Webhooks are quickly becoming the rage in Silicon Valley. If you haven’t heard of them yet, you are certainly going to be barraged with news about them soon. Mark Cuban is talking about them, so is Robert Scoble. Google is rolling out Webhook support in many of their products, and Webhooks have long been a part of Subversion and Paypal.

So, what are Webhooks? Simply put: they are a dead-simple push notification standard for the realtime web.

Webhooks seem destined to displace RSS & ATOM, the current publishing standards for news sources, with something more immediate and efficient. The problem with RSS is that it requires any feed subscriber to poll a server to get updates. This system is both slow and inefficient, since the client polls the server whether there are new updates or not, and only gets new updates every 15 minutes or so. In a Webhook enabled world, data would flow out of a server immediately, and only when necessary.

With services like Twitter, Facebook, and eBay moving in real time it is only appropriate that there is a publishing standard that works at the same pace. The way a Webhook system works is that a client authenticates with the server. When an event happens, the server initiates a simple HTTP request towards all of the authenticated clients which pushes out the new information. Many Webhook enabled services use a hub and spoke model, where the information is pushed to PubSubHubBub repositories (more on that in another post), where it is then published to end users. This model takes the burden of distribution off of the originator of the content.

Google is currently using Webhooks in their Blogger publishing system, which allows Google Reader users to immediately see new posts instead of waiting the typical 15-30 minutes. Google Wave is expected to use Webhooks extensively as well. There are already plugins for Wordpress and MovableType with many more publishing platforms in development. Anyone who has committed code to Subversion has used a Webhook, as has any user of the Paypal Instant Payment Notification system. Their simple, HTTP-POST based, system is allowing developers to add Webhook support to their applications  in mere days.

Webhooks have the potential to become the glue to hold together the web services of the future. One could imagine a decentralized version of Twitter, where thousands of federated servers passed updates to one another without the worry of a systemwide Fail Whale. Realtime stock quotes, weather updates, news headlines, and any other other content that requires low-latency high-scale distribution all seem perfect candidates to make the transition to Webhooks. This is one of those trends you are going to be hearing a lot more about, and for good reason. We, at Thirdi, hope to keep you in the loop as this technology moves from a niche developer project to an essential part of the Internet. Stay tuned.

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Tags: atom, Blogger, Google, publishing, rss, web standards, webhooks

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 7:02 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.