Custom widget development with web services

Sharendipity is proving to be one of the most dynamic (fantastic!) ways of consuming web services of all kinds. With built in support for RESTful web services, it becomes trivial to implement an interface for lots and lots of third party data sources.

When creators chose to share their implementations with the community, everyone gets an opportunity to leverage the web service without ever having to look at an API document. You can simply drag the service into your application and access the data by calling the respective method.

Most implementations available in the community today are returning the data gift wrapped for your enjoyment. For example, you can take advantage of the Facebook Services to access the profile data for all of your friends and it is given to you in a list of “Facebook User” objects. Poof! Your social graph is there for you and you never once went to the Facebook developer wiki!

Likewise, you can use the YouTube services to ask Google for every YouTube video uploaded by a particular user and are presented with a list of assets that not only tells you the URL but also all of the comments, ratings, description, related videos, etc.

As you might tell, I’m smitten with the power of the web services. The following is a sample of the variety of applications that are using web services today…

• Google Docs – info graphics and spelling games
• Facebook – photo browser, photo scrambles,  puzzles, and profile games
• Twitter and Last.fm combined to make data aggregators
• Blogger – blog streams
• YouTube – personalized TV channels
• Posterous – games, blog streams, and media streams
• Flickr – photo streams and games

Most of these examples are application templates, which allow users to personalize the web service calls for their specific needs. For example, the Twitter/Last.fm application lets you configure a band or singer name for the chatter you’d like to display.

Every application comes with its own embed code so you can post it anywhere on the web.

Anyone can implement and share web services so if you haven’t found the service you’re looking for feel free to get started building your own components. You can read our how-to post if you need a primer to get started.