As time progresses, the web becomes more and more connected. Information and data are becoming much easier to access. Here’s 9 ultimate web services that can help you with your next project.

1. Twitter API
   Ah, Twitter. As little as I care about how Ryan Seacrest is eating a green apple, Twitter is a popular service and including it in your web application usually adds to the success of it. Twitter has a robust API that will give you access to just about anything that you need.
2. Last.fm API
   When it comes to music, Last.fm is just about unbeatable. Using their web services, you can access a large amount of data, including artists and their popular tracks, images of artists, and play counts of popular tracks.
3. Amazon Product Advertising API
   Amazon’s Product Advertising API, one of many web services offered by Amazon, is an easy way to get information of products. It can also be used to sell items and earn money through Amazon’s affiliate program. You can find their documentation here. Also, check out a post that I did recently covering a little bit about using their API.
4. Google Maps API
   Using the Google Maps API, you can embed Google Maps in any web page. There isn’t an easier way to display maps to your users. The API is well documented and easy to use. You can find the documentation for the Google Maps API here.
5. Facebook API
   With Facebook being even more popular than Twitter, it’s obvious why the Facebook API is important. The Facebook API is an important part of developing Facebook Applications. You can find the documentation here.
6. YouTube API
   YouTube is the most popular video site on the web. They have a fairly simple API with two core parts – the data API, which lets you search for videos or upload them, and the player API, which lets you embed YouTube videos in your web pages. You can find the documentation for both APIs here.
7. OAuth
   OAuth is a protocol that allows 3rd party applications to interact with service providers. An example of this is Twitter. A user can visit a web application with OAuth and login to their Twitter account without giving their password to the application. The application can then access whatever it needs from Twitter. You can learn more about OAuth here.
8. Yahoo! Maps Web Service
   The Yahoo! Maps Web Service is a web service similar to Google Maps. It allows you to embed maps on your website or geocode addresses. I would consider using it over the Google Maps service if all that I needed was geocoding. Yahoo! offers a really simple geocoding API. You can find the documentation for the whole API here.
9. MediaWiki API
   The MediaWiki API gives you access to the largest encyclopedia on the web: Wikipedia. You can use it to fetch articles, edit articles, add new articles, or do just about anything else. You can find the documentation for the MediaWiki API here.

Have you ever used any of these web services? How have they helped you? What do you think the tenth web service in the list should be? Please leave a comment!