Thoughts after meeting with Firefox China Edition developers
Jono
Online (Beijing) in which I learned a lot of things I didn't know
about the Web in China.
One of these is that Chinese users have a STRONG preference for
clicking over typing, due to the difficulty of Chinese text input
methods.
See: http://hao123.com/ , a site which exists only to host links to
other popular sites, just so that you can get to them without typing
URLs.
Because of this, the Beijing engineering team thinks that some form of
improved mouse-based Ubiquity will be of more interest and value to
Chinese users than even a well-localized-to-Chinese linguistic-input
Ubiquity. (After trying to enter some Chinese characters using
standard input methods, i.e. typing pinyin, I am inclined to agree
with them.)
(It also occurs to me that alternative Chinese (and Japanese, for that
matter) input methods might be a cool thing to explore -- not as part
of Ubiquity, but as a separate project.)
The other interesting thing I learned about is the Live Margins
extension, included as part of Firefox China Edition
(http://www.g-fox.cn/). I got a demo of this today and it is full of
cool features, many of which overlap with stuff we're trying to do in
Ubiquity. Specifically, you can select some text and drag it, and
this triggers a multi-site search to run on that text with results
displayed in the Live Margins sidebar. The really cool thing is that
it ranks the different types of searches by relevance depending on
what type of text you had selected -- e.g. if it's a place name, then
a map appears near the top of the search results. This sounds
remarkably similar to the nountype detection that we are trying to do
in Ubiquity, doesn't it? Apparently the identification of data type
is not being done in the extension itself, but in a third-party
server-side component run by http://linkool.biz/ , who also offer an
extension called Juice (http://grabjuice.com/) that does much the same
thing. You can try this out either by installing Juice, or the Live
Margins extension, or by downloading Firefox China Edition. It's
definitely worth looking into what their servers are doing to achieve
this result.
--Jono
"mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)"
> One of these is that Chinese users have a STRONG preference for
> clicking over typing, due to the difficulty of Chinese text input
> methods.
> See: http://hao123.com/ , a site which exists only to host links to
> other popular sites, just so that you can get to them without typing
> URLs.
>
> Because of this, the Beijing engineering team thinks that some form of
> improved mouse-based Ubiquity will be of more interest and value to
> Chinese users than even a well-localized-to-Chinese linguistic-input
> Ubiquity. (After trying to enter some Chinese characters using
> standard input methods, i.e. typing pinyin, I am inclined to agree
> with them.)
Fascinating. I remember talking to Aza about the way people surf in
China too: very social and laid back (and very different from Taiwan
as well, if memory serves). I wonder what these users' reactions would
be to other UI such as gesture-based systems in addition to the
context-menu-style mouse-based Ubiquity.
> Apparently the identification of data type
> is not being done in the extension itself, but in a third-party
> server-side component run by http://linkool.biz/ , who also offer an
> extension called Juice (http://grabjuice.com/) that does much the same
> thing. You can try this out either by installing Juice, or the Live
> Margins extension, or by downloading Firefox China Edition. It's
> definitely worth looking into what their servers are doing to achieve
> this result.
I'd never heard of Linkool before, but this definitely sounds like
something we should look into. I think building our own nountype
detection framework, centralized or not, able to support multiple
languages, could be a challenging task. It will become more and more
important, however, if we push mouse-based Ubiquity more.
Thanks for doing some work on your honeymoon. ;) We appreciate it.
m
--
mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)
mit...@mitcho.com
http://mitcho.com/
linguist, coder, teacher