Social Scripting for the Web

As our business and personal lives move online, we must learn to carry out increasingly complicated tasks on the Web. The Koala project at IBM's Almaden Research Center (www. research.ibm.com/koala) is aiming to create the next best thing: a wiki-type repository of instructions for Web applications that can help users automate common tasks. In addition to being human-readable, Koala scripts are machine-understandable - the system can interpret each instruction and perform it automatically. At each step, Koala shows you what button to push and then does it for you. It can also fill in fields with your name, address, and other personal information.