Microformats: Firefox Add-on

Sebastian Küpers has written a very good article (in German, though) on the Firefox add-on Operator which detects and processes microformats.

After installation and re-starting Firefox you will see the Operator toolbar that offers two modes to work with. The first mode is called Actions:

As you can see Operator has detected one contact and six tags. You can export the contact or look for the tags on Flickr, Del.icio.us or Technorati.

The second mode is called Microformats:

The contact can be exported to Microsoft’s Live Clipboard (very interesting technology, check it out), as a Firefox Bookmark, as a Yahoo contact, to a website or as a vCard. Also you can look for bookmarks on Del.icio.us, photos on Flickr, events on Upcoming or blogs on Technorati.

Operator supports the following microformats: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, tag and geo. Supported services are: Del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming, Technorati, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Yahoo Contact, Yahoo Calendar and Live Clipboard.

This is an excellent add-on which is demonstrating how powerful microformats are and what you can do with them. I am sure other formats will be supported in future releases.

It would be great, though, if users were able to add more services and customise the add-on themselves. I want to have 30 Boxes as the calendar application for example. Another minor complaint: there should be an option to decide if users want to have the toolbar or rather the information displayed in the status bar or even a context menu solution. There are too many toolbars around.