Sharendipity is a great platform for visualizing third-party data, and it can be done via our REST web services.. This provides an opportunity to access data from an outside source and include it within your application. For example, you can display photographs from your Flickr account, access your Facebook account, or access weather and stock data.

Example Applications

Here are some of the existing examples...

• Flickr Photo Slideshow Template (Flickr) : A customizable web widget that streams photos from Flickr based on a username and/or photo tags.
  
• Flickr Scramble (Flickr) : A customizable puzzle game that uses a Flickr photo as the input to the puzzle.
• Facebook Photo Browser (Facebook) : An application that lets you browse all of the photos in you entire Facebook social graph.
• Facebook Photo Scramble (Facebook) : Like the Flickr example, this is a puzzle game except it uses a photo from your Facebook friends as the input to the puzzle.
• Who Be Me? (Facebook) : This quiz game asks you to pair up random facts about your friends with the correct friend.
• Facebook Photo Demo (Facebook) : A demo application that explains some of the integration points for the Facebook web services.
• Posterous Photo Stream (Posterous) : A customizable web widget that streams photos from your Posterous blog.
• All City Food Drive (Google Docs) : A widget that displays data stored in a Google spreadsheet.
  

Documented Examples

• Facebook API : details on the specific bindings between Sharendipity and Facebook
• Google Docs : example components used to access Google spreadsheet data

Creating your own web service interface

Interested in using web services yourself? You have one of two options...

1. Reuse and existing web service component created by other users. You'll find examples from Facebook, Flickr, Google, Twitter, Posterous, and others. The above example applications are great starting points to learn how some of these are being used today.
   
2. Create your own interface to your favorite web service. For step-by-step instructions, check out this how-to page.