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.

1. Design Your API
Learnings From Twitter + Stamen

2. Basics
We don’t need to define what an API is at this point...

3. http://twitter.com/users/show/al3x.json
...but it’s worth explaining where APIs have ended up. This is an example from the API I
maintain at Twitter. Can anyone guess what it does?

4. (It’s basically all about REST)
Most providers have decided on REST. Google abandoned SOAP. XML-RPC is gradually being
abandoned. This makes a conversation about APIs much simpler.

5. Provider
I’m coming from the perspective of developing, maintaining, and providing an API.