Designing Your API

The document discusses designing APIs and lessons learned from Twitter and Stamen. It notes that most providers have adopted REST over SOAP and XML-RPC and provides an example Twitter API endpoint that returns user data in JSON format. The Twitter API itself comprises most of Twitter's web traffic, has over 1,600 developers and 400 credited applications using a variety of data formats like XML, JSON, RSS and Atom. The API was allowed to grow organically based on community feedback rather than being heavily promoted.