Since Fielding’s seminal contribution on the REST architecture style in 2000, the so-called class of RESTful services has taken off to challenge previously existing Web services. Several books have since then emerged, providing a set of valuable guidelines and design principles for the development of truly RESTful services. However, today’s most popular ”RESTful” services adopt only few of these guidelines, resulting in overburdening developers integrating multiple services in mashup applications. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis for the top 20 RESTful services listed on programmableweb.com against 17 RESTful service design criteria found in literature. Results provide evidence that hardly any of the services claiming to be RESTful is truly RESTful, probably due to the lack of rigidness and ease-of-use of currently available decision criteria. To improve the situation, we provide recommendations for various stakeholder groups.

Advances in mobile communication technologies lead to a coalescence of location-based, multimedia services for user communities. However, easy development and maintenance of device-independent mobile services are still challenging. We have developed a service-oriented framework for mobile multimedia processing based on international standards like MPEG-7. Quality of mobile service experience is constantly monitored in framework. The scenario “Virtual Campfire” is used in the German excellence cluster UMIC (Ultra High-Speed Information and Communication) to demonstrate future mobile social software with real-time multimedia processing, semantic enrichment of multimedia materials by user communities and complex collaboration over the mobile we like storytelling on different mobile devices. Adaptive Web access, service calls and service monitoring are to be demonstrated as the prototype, which offers approaches to meeting the aforementioned challenges.