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Web hooks let you customize, extend and integrate the web applications you use with anything else you can access programmatically. To web developers, web hooks are a simple design pattern that only require the ability to make web requests and to store some extra data about users. To users, web hooks are a way to get events and data in realtime from their web applications. From this they can use the data however they like, empowering them with the ability to extend and integrate, and start seeing the true vision of the programmable web.

By letting the user specify a URL for various events, the application will POST data to those URLs when the events occur. […] How you use it is up to you and whatever you want to accomplish.

http://webhooks.pbwiki.com/