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Oct 6, 20256 mins

APIs, or application programming interfaces, started out as a mechanism to let computers talk to other computers, but somewhere along the way, they’ve evolved into an ecosystem all their own. For virtually any development need, there is likely an API ready and waiting to deliver. Like the Lincoln Logs or Lego bricks of old, APIs are building blocks for creating applications.

APIs can be pretty niche, but major companies like Microsoft and Google have also stretched their tentacles into the world of APIs. Some are just pathways to interact with major products like email, spreadsheets, or AI integrations. Others are information sources, delivering maps, directions, or other content. These APIs can save you the trouble of building your own database from scratch.

Smaller companies and projects might offer something deeper, stranger, more personal, or simply different. All these smaller APIs—some immensely practical, some frivolous and fun—are great options for supporting your applications.

Whether they deliver the whole meal or just some frosting for your cake, here’s a baker’s dozen of APIs that make it easy to grab virtually any kind of data your users might want. We’ll also look at some of the newer generative AI solutions for multimedia data, search, field operations, and more.

Also see: 9 APIs you’ll love for AI integrations and automated workflows.

Keyboard Connect

Video conferencing transformed phone calls by letting callers see each other. Now, Keyboard Connect and similar APIs are adding more layers—in this case, an electric piano. Integrating Keyboard Connect into your video conferencing technology yields a four-part screen that piano teachers can use to teach students anywhere in the world. This API is a good example of how to integrate other APIs like the piano’s MIDI interface into a larger system.

Pexels

A beautiful image can turn a page of gray text into a colorful feast for the eyes. The Pexels API lets you search one of the largest online collections of free stock photos, images, and videos for use in your apps and websites. The only catch is that you must offer credit to both Pexels and the image creator. It’s not a bad trade.

National Park Service

Aside from monitoring mountain lions and bears, the National Park Service also has an API for anyone who wants to integrate its public data into another application. API queries can be used to request information about things like park locations, fees, and campsite amenities. Or you can use the API to track alerts about closures and hazardous conditions. The development roadmap includes adding things like travel tips or transit data.

Hacker News

Browsing the articles and discussions at Hacker News is a time-honored way to track the flow of ideas and creativity in the tech industry. With the Hacker News API, you can get at that data without resorting to scraping the web.

Also see: Chat with data the easy way in R or Python.

Chartbear

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, as happens when you are looking for a bar chart or some other kind of data display. The Chartbear API takes your basic data and builds charts that you can use on your website. Options include bar charts, line charts, area charts, or scatter charts, and you don’t need to worry about creating your own libraries or debugging anything.

Local open data repositories

Most cities, states, and countries offer their own open access APIs that track many government functions. New York City’s data catalog, for example, lists 3,245 data sets at this writing. There’s a good chance your local government has its own API packed with similar data you could use.

InstantAPI

InstantAPI takes a website formatted for humans and creates a machine-ready API by scraping the site and converting all its form elements and other parts. It’s like an API for APIs—a metaAPI, if you will.

Newscatcher

When big news breaks, Newscatcher tracks the locations in the article to deliver “ultra-granular, location-focused news” feeds. The big events in the world are sorted into bins for more than 31,000 different cities, towns, and boroughs. If your business is regionally focused, this API lets you to stay on top of what’s happening in different areas.

Major AI developers like Amazon Rekognition,IBM Watson Visual Recognition, Google Cloud Vision API, and Microsoft Azure AI Vision all host APIs that can help with chores involving images, sound, and other multimedia content. Smaller competitors are also carving out interesting niches for themselves. Clarifai, for instance, is an API for detecting the presence of “logos, apparel, people, vehicles, weapons, uniforms, and hate symbols.” And Roboflow offers specialized functions for enhancing the safety and accuracy of factory operations.

Also see: How agentic AI will transform mobile apps and field operations.

AI-powered search

Artificial intelligence tools are expanding the powers of search engines to find answers that aren’t dependent on particular keywords. Recombee, for instance, has developed an API it calls a “personalization engine” that can be used to expand search capabilities on a website. Algolia offers a “recommendation engine” that’s focused on ecommerce browsers. And Shaped promises to unlock “TikTok level” personalization that can be deeply embedded in many corners of your site.

Conclusion

The APIs collected here are just a sample of what is available. If none of them scratches your particular itch, try running a search with the letters “API” added to whatever search terms capture your task at hand. There’s a good chance someone else has had the same need, and there is already an API ready and waiting to meet it.

Contributing Writer

Peter Wayner is a contributing writer to InfoWorld. He has written extensively about programming languages (including Java, JavaScript, SQL, WebAssembly, and experimental languages), databases (SQL and NoSQL), cloud computing, cloud-native computing, artificial intelligence, open-source software, prompt engineering, programming habits (both good and bad), and countless other topics of keen interest to software developers. Peter also has written for mainstream publications including The New York Times and Wired, and he is the author of more than 20 books, mainly on technology. His work on mimic functions, a camouflaging technique for encoding data so that it takes on the statistical characteristics of other information (an example of steganography), was the basis of his book, Disappearing Cryptography. Peter’s book Free for All covered the cultural, legal, political, and technical roots of the open-source movement. His book Translucent Databases offered practical techniques for scrambling data so that it is inscrutable but still available to make important decisions. This included some of the first homomorphic encryption. In his book Digital Cash, Peter illustrates how techniques like a blockchain can be used establish an efficient digital economy. And in Policing Online Games, Peter lays out the philosophical and mathematical foundations for building a strong, safe, and cheater-free virtual world.

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