[robbles]

Interesting. I didn't realize that there were specs like ALPS for defining how to implement this kind of thing. Isn't it still a little difficult to do this for APIs that don't neatly fit into some kind of generic profile (e.g. microblogging)?

[steveklabnik]

There's a few different ways to go about things, but every app has some kind of domain. If you're the first, then you can define how it works. :)

Mike Amundsen's terribly named but amazingly well written 'Building Hypermedia APIs in HTML5 and Node' is a really thorough examination of this topic.