Something occurred to me a while back, which I choose not to mention, essentially because if I had it badly wrong, I would embarrass myself. But, I googled a bit, and didn't find the analogy made elsewhere, so I don't have confirmation from the REST experts.
I have 2nd generation iPod nano (not that the version matters), and as I navigate around the interface, I see something which in lots of places seem to be RESTful design. Firstly it seems to have a uniform interface. Furthermore, as I go through 'music->artists->elvis', etc ... I am navigating links. This is "connectedness" as described in RESTful Web Services. Actually, I would like to see more from the Pod in this direction - for example, for the song I am currently listening to, it would be nice to see how this is linked into which playlist, genre, etc. This would be going in the linked data direction. Furthermore, I believe I see a very nice example of the mysterious hypermedia as the engine of application state, in, for example, the stopwatch function of the ipod.
Hopefully, I am not too far off with this analogy. I find a lot of inspiration for the design of the Grid as a Web application from my MP3 player - i.e. I find it quite useful to think in terms of "how this would be done on the ipod", when thinking about REST.
(?)
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Perhaps you have just experienced the result of enforcing certain constraints on human-machine interaction.
These constraints, as you said, are closely resemblance to a few (not all) REST constraints. But IFAIK, REST was mainly applied for machine-machine interaction.
So, maybe think about if you replace yourself with a software agent? Interesting observation though :-)
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