08.28.08

It’s ubiquitous!

Posted in Info at 6:20 am by Jono

“Wow!”

That’s pretty much all I can say about this fantastic new Firefox add-on. Ubiquity is just incredible. I really don’t mean to gush, but this is a seriously cool user interface.

New from the Mozilla Labs, essentially what Ubiquity does is allow for the use of dynamic commands in Firefox to complete common web tasks quickly and easily. What this means is that you can create mash-ups on the fly, map things, tweet, quote text and reviews, email sections of text… pretty much anything you can think of.

At the moment, it seems to function very well as a command-line browser. The added benefit is when text is already selected in the browser, the commands will act on that text. Still, the most exciting application is it’s capability to extract items from web pages and to compile them in whatever you’re creating.

Ubiquity seeks to solve the problem of a “disconnected web” – so now, for example, rather than just adding links to emails – users can make their own mash-ups by inserting pictures, maps, reviews or anything else that may be relevant.

It does this by connecting the web with natural language.

Naturally, much of this amazing functionality would not have been possible previously due to closed APIs. Today, micro-formats allow data to be mashed up and visualised in any way you want. Although much of this is still experimental – it’s easy to see the huge potential.

The example that is given on the introductory video uses a list of addresses for apartments in San Francisco from CraigsList. The addresses are highlighted and the command is given in Ubiquity to “map these”. Immediately, the addresses are plotted onto Google Maps – so you are able to visualise where each is.

Other cool applications include being able to do translations and look-ups anywhere on the web.

Of course, users are encouraged to participate, author commands and share through the wiki. This is the first Alpha 0.1 version – and I can not wait to see how it’s improved and grows in the future.

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