Friday, August 29, 2008
Mozilla Labs Experiments with Ubiquity
byMozilla Labs recently introduced an innovative project called Ubiquity that enables the use of simple language to further connect the Web and empower users. Ubiquity comes in the form of a prototype Firefox extension and its interface is a simple command-line overlay in which a user can type such things as “email this to Joe.”
Ubiquity expands the web by utilizing existing web services such as Gmail, Yelp, Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, Wikipedia and many others to enable users to create their own mashups. Mozilla describes the use of Ubiquity as “issuing” commands. For instance, the phrase mentioned earlier works like this:
- The first word “email” is used to trigger the Ubiquity command to use Gmail.
- The keyword “this” refers to content that is highlighted within the Web browser.
- Finally, “to Joe” looks at the user’s contact list and finds the email address for Joe.
I recommend watching the Ubiquity video demo to better understand the possibilities of using straight forward language in this way.
Ubiquity also provides options and a preview while issuing commands in order to speed up tasks. It is definitely an interesting concept of taking some of the “work” out of working online. There’s a little bit of a learning curve in order to speak the language of Ubiquity but Mozilla provides a short, yet informative tutorial and a helpful command list.
Mozilla has released Ubiquity as open source software and their goal is to allow anyone to create commands in order to inspire people to come up with powerful uses of the technology. The prototype is currently available to demo and I have to say I’ve enjoyed playing around with this software and imagining my own ways of expanding the use of language to connect the Web.
