Update: Marc AD ndersson pointed out this great piece of info:http://blogs.office.com/2014/08/13/json-light-support-rest-sharepoint-api-released/. That explains a lot .
That may be the worst title of a blog post ever! Anyhoo.
I typically do all of my prototyping against an O365 instance. I have my personal instance so that I don’t have to be worried about affecting anyone else. [...]