My pal Ted Nadeau just hipped me to yubnub, which bills itself as a social command line for the web. It looks like an extremely powerful meta-syntax for accessing searches and other web services via unix-y looking shorthands, regular expressions, and mini-scripts. It also seems to have a very active community rapidly extending its capabilities.
Grazing through the yubnub blog you can see news about an instant-mashup command, a way to invoke automatic spellchecking of your search on the fly, a fellow who says he is starting to handwrite his notes to himself in yubnub shorthand, and a way to invoke yubnub commands via Yahoo Open Shortcuts.
It’s also possible to install yubnub into Firefox so for example you can run a Yahoo! search from the address bar with “y y searchterm” (the first y invokes yubnub and the second one specifies a yahoo search - you’d use “y g etc” for a Google search and so on).
The energy of the user community is fairly inspiring.
UPDATE: I notice that the blog peters out around April of last year so, (a) this is not really new news to anyone but me, and (b) what happened to the blog?
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