From Jason Salas’s interview with Jeff Lindsay, the guy who invented the term web hooks:

“For example, the Facebook Platform, although pretty complicated and full of their own technology, is still at the core based on web hooks. They call out to a user-defined external web application and integrate that with their application. That’s quite a radically different use of web hooks compared to the way people think of them in relation to XMPP.”

That’s an interesting point: while nothing is stopping XMPP from being used this way, it’s not how it is currently used. XMPP seems to be gaining some adoption for asynchronous or messaging-style tasks, but I haven’t seen much in the way of generalised RPC over XMPP yet. (Perhaps I’ve overlooked something obvious?) HTTP, on the other hand, is being used both for asynchronous operations (HTTP push, where the HTTP response has no body, and serves as an acknowledgement of receipt or completion) and for synchronous RPC-like operations (JSON-RPC, SOAP, CGI, ordinary static web pages).

Web hooks can be seen as an approach to making it easier for people to participate in the world of distributed objects that is HTTP — a worthy goal.