Ushering in the Era of Command-Line Applications with Mozilla Ubiquity!
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So, What is Mozilla Ubiquity?
Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension, from Mozilla Labs, that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web.
This public prototype aims to empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. Existing web APIs have been utilized to create on-demand and user-created mashups. Ubiquity runs commands based on bits of text entered into a command prompt. This has staggering implications for empowering the common web user to remix content more easily by controlling the flow of information around them.
Ubiquity is designed to help ordinary people create something like mashups and to do it on a personal basis instead of in the form of a public Web page. The commands that users type in Ubiquity, such as “map” and “e-mail,” find resources on the Web and can gather information from those sources in one place.
Why does the concept sound familiar to me?
Are you a MS or Internet Explorer fan? In that case, I do not blame you. Ever heard of “web slices” on IE8? It is the platform’s capability to take a portion of a Web page–like a stock chart on a financial page–and display it as a pop-up widget that’s called from the bookmark bar in the browser. Slices are built using a combination of protocols, including Microformats, RSS and new HTML tags that IE uses to demark Slices.
Using Slices, you can view friend’s status from Facebook, Monitor ebay items, track the buzz items from Stumbleupon, get the news headlines, track the weather and much more.
How powerful can Ubiquity be?
“Pretty much” is how I’d like to answer.
If you wish to write an email to your friend “jono”, all you need to do is fire up the Ubiquity command-line and type away.
You can search through the whole of Wikipedia without even visiting the encyclopaedic giant for once!
Search for the weather of the city you plan to visit, just by typing out a few characters.
Found anything interesting to share on the web? Do that in a zap, even faster than you can say “Ubiquity”.
You can even publish a map mashup pointing directions to the nearest pub or coffee shop right into the email you send to the friend!
So, what do you think? Does all this sound titillating enough for you to download the extension and test ride it?If you want complete list of the user commands available, do not forget to visit the tutorial page.
Ubiquity has the potential to usher in a whole new way of interacting on the web, and I’m glad an open source organization like Mozilla is pioneering it.
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