I was looking for a good image tagging and analysis API and found an unexpected treat of a website: market.mashape.com. Mashape is apparantly a company that sells software to API providers for a variety of things, but the cool thing about them is their API marketplace.

According to their website, they have 1,300 public apis that you can easily search through, plus who knows how many private ones. Here are some of  their recently-featured ones:

I actually found them because my Google search results took me to a listing inside their marketplace, but I'm glad they did, because Mashape had a special feature that made accessing the API even easier: premade credentials.

That's right! After signing up for the Mashape site (I think I used my Github or Google account to do it), I had easy access to some Mashape credentials that I could just tack onto my API call headers and be authorized for this API. (I happened to be using the Face++ API, which worked great.)

Another helpful thing they show you is an example of what the response data will look like, as you can see below:

Next time I need an API, this is going to be the place I go to look first. Or even if I just need an app idea I might go here. Seeing APIs for things like 23 and Me made me want to build an app that uses genetics data, which is something that had never crossed my mind before.