Jonathan Aquino, founder of YubNub, is a programmer and analyst living in British Columbia, Canada. Visit his blog here.

What is YubNub and why did you create it?

YubNub is a little web service that lets people access other web services. Here's an example: typing "gim porsche" will do a Google Image Search for porsches. Typing "wp warren buffet" will take you to a wikipedia search for "warren buffet". It's kind of like the Windows command prompt, but for websites. And the beauty part is that anyone can add new commands. My part in the saga is essentially done - I've built the YubNub core - now it's up to others to add commands to it.

There are a variety of ways to access YubNub - I typically use the Firefox search bar.

What technology is behind it, and what was the development process like?

YubNub runs on Ruby on Rails - actually it was my entry in the 1995 Ruby on Rails contest. Database is MySQL; the hosting provider is TextDrive. It's open source - the code is here.

Are you running this by yourself? What are your plans for its future?

Yup I'm running it. Operating cost is $12USD/month, the TextDrive hosting fee. As for future plans, I believe my work is done. It's up to the community now to build on it by adding commands. Some of the most interesting commands are those that aren't actually commands but extend YubNub in some way. For example, someone named fuska wrote a command called % that other commands use to get "positional parameters"--type "man %" to check that one out.