The PodiPodi Website Enhancement Tool

PodiPodi is a very cool way of adding non intrusive user interface enhancements to your websites. It is an experimental project in human-Machine Interaction inspired by Enso, a command line interface for desktop systems developed by Humanized, Inc. PodiPodi is a widget developed in JavaScript which allows you to easily add features without redesigning your blog or website.

I just received an invite from PodiPodi and got a chance to test their service. I must say that this particular enhancement widget is very impressive. It looks great and what I like about it is that it doesn’t interfere with the browsing. It gives the user the power to choose if he/she wants to use it or not. It will only load a service only if initiated by the user. The widget is customizable and can be done in your PodiPodi account. The owner can select which additional services he wants to add in his website.

How it Works:

Once the plugin is installed, just click the PodiPodi button or simply press Shift+Spacebar. A command line interface will appear and the user can immediately use the additional services that the owner added. Just type help on the PodiPodi command line to get the list of commands and services available for the particular site. I installed the widget and it’s already running at Orangeinks so that you can test it here.

Below is the list of service enhancements available (and coming soon) in PodiPodi.

• Info: Show additional information about the website
• Calculate: Calculate the result of a simple
mathematical expression.
• Send a comment: Visitors of the site can send messages to the web owner
• Tell a friend: Visitors can send messages to their friends and tell them about the website
• Sitemap: Show the site map of the website for a better navigation
• Flickr: show web designer’s pictures posted in Flickr or search for photos on Flickr
• Friends: Show your friend sites
• Google Web Search: make possible to perform searches through Google, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Google Images Search: make possible to perform searches through Google Images, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Yahoo Web Search: make possible to perform searches through Yahoo, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Yahoo Images Search: make possible to perform searches through Yahoo Images, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Youtube Search: make possible to perform searches through Google Videos and YouTube, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Weather (coming soon): get the weather of a specific location or the city specified by the owner of the website
• Wikipedia (coming soon): Search wikipedia for specific contents

PodiPodi has been tested and works great in the browsers listed below:
Firefox2, Firefox3, Safari 2,Opera 9 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (in IE6 no rounded corners yet, probably never…)

The service is still in private beta. If you want to try it in your websites, you have to register as a beta tester for PodiPodi.