Finding Web Services

Every so often I go looking for a public web service to do a job and end up at a UDDI Registry, like the one run by Microsoft. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) came with the promise of providing searchable metadata to make web services easy to find and use from client software. A UDDI registry is a place where business and individuals can publish their metadata and become “discoverable”.

All the registries I find are terrible.

The registries contain out of date information, have confusing interfaces and categorizations, but worst of all they are not comprehensive. I have not found a registry yet that lists any of the latest and greatest web services for maps, photos, or blogs. Perhaps no one with a public web service cares about UDDI anymore, as UDDI always seemed destined for large, heterogeneous corporations to use inside the firewall.

I have, however, found two nice repositories for open web service APIs, thanks to Alex Barn’s blog:

Web 2.0 APIs
WSFinder Wiki