Question: Hey all. I need to work on all of the skills that come along with working with web services in Android. Most of the apps I've worked on have used static/local data. Obviously, to create something powerful, I need to learn how to work with web services. 

To that end, does anyone have any recommendations for an easy API to work with? I don't really have any preference (I'm doing this project just so I can learn), though I'd rather not work with Twitter.

So, I'm looking for one of the popular APIs, but something that's relatively simple so that I don't have to be bogged down in an ultra-complex API. I want to be able to focus more on the Android/Java implementation. 

Thanks a lot!

Answer: 
My suggestion would be to go with Facebook;

<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/mobile/#android>

While many others might disagree, some maybe saying it isn't a web service at all, personally I liked the idea of having many different kinds of data. And chose to do some experiments on top of Facebook Graph API based on pretty much same rationale you're describing here.

It really doesn't take long while to make your first connection, namely have your application authorized, and after you have an access token, Graph API is rather intuitive to use. And Facebook SDK doesn't make it any harder either.

Anyway, that's my two cents, nothing more, nothing less.
First web API I used was Flickr. They have great documentation, most (all?) of the data can be returned in JSON format, and it's pretty expansive. I thought it was pretty simple to use, myself.