Thanks for summing up, concisely, why webhooks really aren't magic at all, in the fourth paragraph:<p>"All [webhooks] are is a promise by an application or API: “when this thing happens, I’ll send this HTTP request with this data.”"<p>It's nice to see that all the hype really just boils down to generalized pingbacks[1]. Now, having a standard is great -- I'm not entirely sure we <i>have</i> a standard yet, though. It's more like a fancy name for pingbacks that aren't just for blog posts.<p>I'm also not entirely sure if I'd prefer webhooks for eg. processing emails. Emails are naturally "push" -- they get pushed via SMTP. I know that people are scared of email/SMTP -- but it seems quite a lot easier to make sure you don't loose any "events" with SMTP than with HTTP(S).<p>What if your site is down for a few minutes, just as some service out there tries to "ping" you with a webhook? Email handles that.<p>I think what most people seem to mix up is that handling "real" email may be hard -- but looking for a well formed subject that exactly matches some regex, then parsing that, isn't that hard. Everything else you can either bounce (a little dangerous) or just drop (not quite as dangerous).<p>Mailing-lists work. What you need isn't much more complicated. Maybe allow for a mime-part with a json or xml, or some other well-formed body. Use gpg or smime to encrypt data, if you need something more than a short hash/token.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback</a>