It is being done.

You need to have a chat with Tessa Lau and company at IBM research and ask her about Koala (there’s a little screencast and a pdf: Koala: Capture, Share, Automate, Personalize Business Processes on the Web)

The ingredients are all there: a firefox extension, sidebar UI, capture sequence of repetitive tasks in browser, pipe, filter and customize, store resultant script, optionally share said script tagging it for later discovery by community, promote and foster an ecosystem of popular scripts, watch how it is used.

The initial users will be folks wanting recipes for the boring bureaucratic tasks but this is a very general framework.

Let’s just say this: I’ve actually ordered business cards using a Koala script braving Big Blue’s ordering process.

The hard problems will still be there: for certain processes you need to deal with authentication. You need to factor out personal credentials so that the scripts can be reused by others…

Anyway Tessa has her hands full but its a very promising start. This shouldn’t stay as research for long; Real People (TM) are using it.

There’s another aspect that bears pondering. A lot of these processes are simply form applications (sometimes multi-step). What would happen if you didn’t have to spend so much time inferring structure e.g. navigate to the 3rd text field on second on page? What if the form’s structure was explicitly externalized? Such things would be quite easy to pull together. Forms sadly continue to be neglected on the web. For now we have the messiness of deciphering intent and programming by demonstration is fair starting point.

It’s funny, it’s all about providing the same empowerment of the Excel or Applescript user for the web user. I think we have the data exchange in hand, we have the transport the transfer and the data definition. We have uris, we have feeds and even publish protocols.

What remains are the challenges of the glue layer:
1. how to effectively wire these things together
2. how the social issues are addressed