Web Intents take the web by storm

Yesterday, the Chromium team announced their upcoming integration of Web Intents with Chrome.

Web Intents are the translation of Android's intents feature to the web. Developed towards the end of last year initially by UK Googler Paul Kinlan, it represents the culmination of several efforts inside Google along a similar line, including a project called Web Introducer.

The basic idea behind Web Intents is quite simple. At the moment, if a website wants to integrate another site's services (for example, adding a Twitter button or a +1 button), they have to do that explicitly for each service. But what if your user wants to use another great service that you haven't happened to implement? They have no way of easily doing that from your site. Web Intents allow web developers to expose their services as Intents, and then owners of the other websites to permit an easy integration by specifying they want to allow a "share" intention, for example, and then allowing the user to choose the sharing service from the list of those available.

We asked Kinlan what he expects to be the primary use case that users and developers will really "get" for why Web Intents are a great idea. "Sharing and Subscribing to feeds or data using the tools you know and love rather than the tools that the developer can integrate with. We can help developers remove the 300 buttons you see on pages to integrate with social networks."

"There are a lot of other use cases, such as Edit. Why be forced to use the providers choice of integrated service to edit a photo or a document, when you can use the tools that you use day in day out."

"For me, users won't see "web intents" as a term," he added. "They will just see applications that integrate with the other applications that they use already."

"From a developer perspective we are starting to see a proper service componentisation on the web. I don't have to spend hours integrating twitter sharing, or image editing in to my application."

Look out for more Web Intents-supporting services coming out in the coming weeks.