Last month, Burner released Connections, which are integrations between Burner phone numbers and third-party applications and services like Dropbox, Slack, and Evernote. These connections enable great new capabilities for phone numbers, such as automatically archiving photo messages to Dropbox.

Today, Burner is releasing its Developer Connection, which users and developers can use to connect Burner to any number of applications, or to make new, custom applications, using something called webhooks.

It’s a huge step forward for Burner toward becoming an open platform, and an important milestone in the journey toward smarter phone numbers for everyone.

Give us a shout at 323-391-4827 if you have comments, questions, or other feedback! That number is connected to our team Slack account and we'll be awaiting your texts!

What are webhooks?

Webhooks are a simplified version of the kinds of API’s that many applications use to talk to each other. When something happens in one application that it wants to pass along to another application, the first application simply hits an URL with a basic POST command containing the information it needs to pass along. The other application is always ready for that information and knows what to do with it.

Because they’re so simple and straightforward and avoid the complications of chattier integrations, many applications today use webhooks, from familiar consumer apps like Dropbox to speciality and business-to-business services like Github, Stripe, and Sendhub.

There’s also a whole ecosystem of 3rd-party players emerging to help people set up, manage, and do things with the webhooks and the data they’re delivering, so there are lots of ways of handling webhooks for novices and technical pros alike.

How does Burner’s Developer Connection work?

The first feature of Burner’s Developer Connection is an outgoing webhook. It lets a user specify a URL via the Burner app. Once the webhook is enabled, then every time the user gets a text message, picture message, or voicemail, Burner will post to the details to that URL in a standardized format (see http://developer.burnerapp.com for more detailed information).

That URL can be another application with public-facing webhook URLs (these would be called incoming webhooks when issued by the other application). A developer or company can set up a custom URL just to take webhooks from Burner. Or a user can use any of a whole bunch of tools to handle the webhook, transform it if they want to, and pass it along to whatever other application they want it to talk to.

Do I need to be a computer programmer to use this?

Not at all. An example of a very easy way to use the Burner Developer Connection would be through the application IFTTT (“If This Then That”). IFTTT if a free-to-use service (and one we’re big fans of) that enables incoming webhooks via something they call the Maker Channel (https://ifttt.com/maker), which provides unique URLs a user can simply copy and paste into Burner. Every time the Burner number gets a text, picture, or voicemail, IFTTT will get the info and can pass it along into its hundreds of other applications via thousands of premade recipes, all of which are “no coding required”.