Command Line for the Web

flood6 writes "SearchEngineWatch offers a look at a new method of interacting with the Internet, YubNub. This 'social command line for the web' lets users create commands that interact with websites. Currently, most of the commands apply to search, but new commands could work with any site that accepts variables passed with HTML's GET command. For example, iap moon would search the Internet Archive for all media related to 'moon'."

Comments

Interesting Concept, but needs moderation

[WebHostingGuy]

I like the concept, however the premise is the flaw. What I mean by this is that the social concept of letting people add their own commands is the biggest draw, but the biggest flaw. Doing a quick ls on the site reveals such choice commands on the first page:

p Created 2005-06-20 16:21 - Description - Nominate - www.pogo.com --does nothing

tiki Created 2005-06-20 15:10 - Description - Nominate - http://www.tehanitrading.com/ --takes you to somone's website only

And then of course you have the sophisticated ones:

fuckthefucker Created 2005-06-20 12:55 - Description - Nominate - http - does nothing

And if you try to create a legitimate command and something like "p" is already taken you are out of luck. This is why you will need someone to moderate it from time to time (this is sort of on the to do list by flagging spam commands, but it looks like they also have a potential problem with bot submissions as well). But, once you do this then you get the problem of my command is better than your command. It would be nice to see an individual implementation whereby you could store your own commands and could "share" them with others.

toolbar

[MankyD]

This would seem to have more worth if it was done with a plugin/toolbar. Right now, it requires that I switch to my address bar, type in yubnub.org, wait for it to load, switch to the form input, and type in my command.

Much better if one could skip straight to the command part.

we have all this, don't we?

[prgrmr]

Lynx, archie, veronica, gopher, ping, traceroute, whois, nslookup... sound familiar to anyone else?