If This Then That (IFTTT for short) is a cool web service that lets users manipulate and react to events on different websites by taking other actions in response.

For example, I can tell IFTTT: IF I post a new photo to Instagram THEN take that photo and store a copy in my Dropbox folder.

IFTTT currently has 50 channels (or services) that you can wire together in similar fashion to create all sorts of interesting combinations of events.

However, one output channel is sorely missing: Webhooks.

Granted, webhooks are not for the general user. This is why IFTTT is great, because it is trying to solve the webhook case for most consumer needs.

But, as a developer I want access to my event data so I can use it however I please. In this way, webhooks would be the perfect solution as an output channel for IFTTT.

When IFTTT announced its partnership with WeMo to do interesting things with real-world hardware, I assumed IFTTT was headed in the direction of helping to power the Internet Of Things and really get it off the ground.

Last night, I needed a way to be notified each time I posted a new tweet. So, I went to IFTTT to setup a Twitter-to-webhook recipe and found that I could not.

@jazzychad there's so much potential for it, it's definitely on our list for development consideration.

— IFTTT (@IFTTT) August 5, 2012

Hmm, this says to me, "Thanks, but it's not even on our todo list."

That's unfortunate. IF IFTTT wants to become a platform and become the central hub for the evented web THEN they need to make it as appealing as possible for developers to love the system and start to build cool things with it. Developers will be inspired to tell their friends about it, and IFTTT will continue to gain traction in the consumer space.

Myabe I'm way off base. Maybe their consumer growth traction is fine and they don't need to cater to the power-user/developer edge cases in order to reach their goals.

All I know is I want webhooks.

Further discussion on Hacker News.

— Fin.

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