I'm designing a RESTful api at the moment and using get, post, put, and delete to represent select, insert, update, and delete gives users a clear pattern when new features are added. Right now say there are just photos in my app. Post json or XML to /photos to create a new one, put to /photos/123/ to update. Now I announce that I'm adding videos. The pattern is exactly the same, the URL is just / videos. But I suppose you're right, I could achieve the same effect with ?object=video&action=createNew, but why make users learn a new vocabulary?