URL Hacks to Launch Web Services

Thursday, February 12, 2009

URL Hacks to Launch Web Services

I don’t know exactly how to describe this, but I really like this new pattern in web services of adding something to a URL in order to use a web service. Perhaps this is best described through two examples:

If you put “http://bacolicio.us/” (no quotes) in front of a URL, it will put a piece of bacon on the website. Example: http://bacolicio.us/http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/
If you put “pwn” in a YouTube domain you can download the video you are watching… for example, if I’m watching “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0” then I can insert “pwn” between “www.” and “youtube.com” to generate the following new URL: http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 which allows me to download the video.

I’d love to see more web services do this kind of thing. I want to use this method to do stuff like, save to del.icio.us, get comScore/Compete metrics for a site, or email a link. It’s fun in a geeky way.