Simon St. Laurent at XML.com - The Next Web?:

"Developers who craft smart APIs on their servers for use by AJAX-based web pages can then expose those APIs to other developers, getting the benefits of better interfaces for users who use web browsers to consume the data and for users who have their own custom programs consuming the data. Depending on how carefully the developer models AJAX transactions on traditional web HTTP transactions, these services even look a lot like the REST approach proposed earlier for web services."