Firefox Operator Add-On for Microformats

A lovely new extension/addon for Firefox called Operator has just been announced over at Mozilla Labs. Its basic functionality is similar to Tails and Tails Export in that it detects microformats on web pages and allows you to do “stuff” with them but it looks like the author, Michael Kaply at IBM, has big plans for Operator and felt that he could not achieve that with the existing tools.

Some of the things you can do include:

1. Send the phone number of your favorite pizza place from Yahoo! Local to your address book, without having to type anything
2. If you view an event at Upcoming.org you can easily add the event to your calendar to see if you are free, or map the location of the event to see where it will take place
3. Navigate from blog post tags to the same tags on Flickr.
4. Push coordinates of geo-tagged pictures to Google maps.
5. View and validate the microformats source

This really is a superb piece of software and like Live Clipboard, shows more of the practical possibilities presented by microformats. It’s a lot more than a nice way of marking up data.