Social Commands for the Web
Monday, June 26th, 2006
WubHub is another social commands service for the web, alongside YubNub. It’s interesting that their names are so similar. The aim is to satisfy those linux and dos junkies out there by extending the notion of a command prompt to the web.
You may be asking why a command prompt would be of value to anyone for the web. Aren’t command prompts a legacy that the typical user rarely ever needs? The fact is, that, for many, the command line interface is one of the fastest and most efficient way to access information. This is no different for web interfaces.
For example, suppose that I’m a physics researcher who relies heavily on Wikipedia. It’s become a real time killer to go to the Wikipedia homepage, wait for it to load, and then type in my search term, then wait again for the results. Instead, I could just go to WubHub and type in “wp(atomic physics)”, and I’ll immediately get sent to the results page. The key is that I’ll get used to typing wp(something) so often that it will become second nature, and will eventually help save me time.
They also have other commands that are useful, like “imdb()” to search imdb and “deliciousPopular()” to search on del.icio.us. Since this is a social application, users can also submit their own useful commands for querying other services. As more users add commands, value is added to WubHub.
WubHub, however, does have its shortcomings. It really needs to have browser integration like YubNub does, so that I can type in my commands straight into a search box on my browser. Having to go to the WubHub website each time I want to query is a deal-killer. Another problem is that the command structure is quite rigid at the moment, only allowing queries that conform to “wp(test)”. Otherwise, WubHub will hit you with an error. What they really need is to implement a flexible parser that can take a variety of syntaxes, like “wp test”, “wp test”, “wp[test]”, or “wp{test}”.
If you’re one to cringe at command line interfaces, I would still suggest giving YubNub and WubHub a try. You might be suprised at how much time they could save you. And, if you find that there’s a service you use that’s not covered, try adding a command for it.
WubHub is another social commands service for the web, alongside YubNub. It’s interesting that their names are so similar. The aim is to satisfy those linux and dos junkies out there by extending the notion of a command prompt to the web.
You may be asking why a command prompt would be of value to anyone for the web. Aren’t command prompts a legacy that the typical user rarely ever needs? The fact is, that, for many, the command line interface is one of the fastest and most efficient way to access information. This is no different for web interfaces.
For example, suppose that I’m a physics researcher who relies heavily on Wikipedia. It’s become a real time killer to go to the Wikipedia homepage, wait for it to load, and then type in my search term, then wait again for the results. Instead, I could just go to WubHub and type in “wp(atomic physics)”, and I’ll immediately get sent to the results page. The key is that I’ll get used to typing wp(something) so often that it will become second nature, and will eventually help save me time.
They also have other commands that are useful, like “imdb()” to search imdb and “deliciousPopular()” to search on del.icio.us. Since this is a social application, users can also submit their own useful commands for querying other services. As more users add commands, value is added to WubHub.
WubHub, however, does have its shortcomings. It really needs to have browser integration like YubNub does, so that I can type in my commands straight into a search box on my browser. Having to go to the WubHub website each time I want to query is a deal-killer. Another problem is that the command structure is quite rigid at the moment, only allowing queries that conform to “wp(test)”. Otherwise, WubHub will hit you with an error. What they really need is to implement a flexible parser that can take a variety of syntaxes, like “wp test”, “wp test”, “wp[test]”, or “wp{test}”.
If you’re one to cringe at command line interfaces, I would still suggest giving YubNub and WubHub a try. You might be suprised at how much time they could save you. And, if you find that there’s a service you use that’s not covered, try adding a command for it.
