Introducing Ubiquity
Chris Beard
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San
Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to
include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message
composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site,
searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and
finally copying all links into the message being composed. This
familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching,
copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you
haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.
This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web.
Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web
development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-
centric.
It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and
fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.
Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of
the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are
left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in
frustration and wasted time.
Enter Ubiquity
Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs
experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find
new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do
common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
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.
Read more at http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/