Web clouds are clearing

More and more applications are crowding the web. Here’s a tool that will help clear the clutter. JOSH CATONE

By Josh Catone

You’ve heard it before; the web is an operating system. As more and more applications move into the cloud, the web is becoming the platform for the majority of our computing.

But getting to those web applications and managing them is still cumbersome. So perhaps, what the web needs is a launcher.

Over the weekend, 21-year-old German software developer Julius Eckert debuted a site that does just that at Keyboardr.com.

For now, Keyboardr looks like just yet another meta search engine — you type in a keyword and instantly get back results from Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube on a single page. You can navigate around those results with just your keyboard’s arrow keys, hence the name of the site.

In its current form, Keyboardr is rather ho-hum.

But what is exciting are the plans that Eckert has for Keyboardr. In the future Keyboardr will begin to act like a launcher for web services, including Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Docs, Flickr, and Delicious.

Users will be able to essentially launch those web applications in a new window or tab with just a couple of keystrokes. Ajaxian compares it to the brilliant Mac launcher application Quicksilver — which makes sense, given that Eckert is a known Mac fan. It seems likely that he drew inspiration from Quicksilver.

Eckert plans to eventually open up Keyboardr via API so that developers are able to build in support for all sorts of web services. In the demo video (embedded at the end of this post), Eckert gives a demonstration of the Friendfeed launcher running in a production version of the application that isn’t yet available to the public.

Keyboardr is a great idea, but we’d love to see it as a browser extension or an Adobe AIR application, rather than just a web app. Being able to launch web applications with a couple of key strokes sounds great, but it’s still sort of clumsy to have to navigate to a web page to do it — that actually adds a step to the process of opening a web application, rather than takes one away.

Yes, you can set Keyboardr.com as your browser homepage, but during the course of an average day, how often are you actually at your set homepage? As a Firefox extension or an AIR app, Keyboardr could sit in the background and serve up its quick launching goodness no matter where you are.

keyboardr.com from Julius Eckert on Vimeo.