What do you do when you’re looking for something on the Internet? Turn to a search engine (Google, Live, Yahoo, etc.)? Probably. Search engines are the command-line of the Internet (Google in particular). I don’t remember who coined that phrase but it’s pretty accurate.
If you’re looking for a bite to eat in Canada’s largest city, you’ll pull up http://live.com and type ‘restaurants downtown toronto’. The search engine does a bit of parsing and figures out what you’re looking for.
Now take that concept and apply it more generally to browser tasks. You have a bunch of restaurant reviews up and you want to see where the restaurants are on a map. What do you do?
<shrug>
I know. It’s a pain to manually map all those addresses. But imagine if you could type ‘map-these’ in your browser somewhere and a map would pop up with all the choices shown. That would be cool.
Mozilla has released an initial prototype of a project / experiment called Ubiquity that promises exactly that type of functionality and much, much more. Check out the video below – it really shows the budding potential of Ubiquity. It made me mutter, "Holy crap – that’s cool."
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.
- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
- Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
- Extend the browser functionality easily.
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/