…is an odd thing. I spotted it a while back but didn’t quite take to it at the time. It seemed more quirky than handy. Fast-forward to the present, and it actually seems like a useful little thing. It describes itself as a command line for the web, though the implications for this don’t sink in straightaway.
What converted me, I guess, was a combination of several points:
- It is supported with a neat FireFox plugin, so I don’t have to go to the yubnub page. It’s as close as my address bar.
- I’m using a more diverse range of web services than I used to. There are more out there and they are more open. This means you can do lots of useful things without navigating through different interfaces.
- An bewildering range of existing commands with unlimited possibilities for creating more.
I thought this would be pretty neat, being able to search wikipedia for stuff with ‘wp stuff‘ and google map with ‘gm weoley castle‘. But then I saw that you could do crazy stuff like set a countdown timer with ‘timer 10‘ or generate passwords with ‘passwd‘. Of course, yubnub is only an interface to existing services but its value comes in stripping out the extra crap you’d have to wade through to get there.