Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox’s New Ubiquity UI
Mozilla launched a new experimental browser plug-in Tuesday that has the power to change the way people interact with the dozens of web services they use every day.
The project, called Ubiquity, is an open-source extension to the Firefox web browser. To start testing it out, grab the prototype add-on, a free download for all platforms, from Mozilla Labs.
Ubiquity is basically an attempt to build an easy-to-grasp user interface for the open web at large. It’s a command-line user interface, which, for most people, may not sound at all like an “easier” way to communicate with an application. But the important thing that Ubiquity does is allow users to manipulate web services by typing commands into the browser using plain language.
Think of the way Google Calendar’s “Quick Add” feature currently works. You type “Lunch with Scott at La Taqueria Wednesday noon” and an event appears on your calendar a few seconds later. The application is able to parse your plain language entry and generate an event with a date, a time, an attendee list and, if you’re specific enough, a map.
That’s what Ubiquity is aiming to do across multiple web services. So, to post to Twitter with Ubiquity, you’d just bring up the Ubiquity window in Firefox and type the command:
twitter I’m trying out Ubiquity. Very cool!
And just like that, it’s posted. There are a few things happening behind the scenes here. You have to have the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox installed, for starters. To get the Ubiquity command line, you hit option-space. It brings up an overlay that looks like this:
Type your message and hit Enter. Then, if you’re not logged in to Twitter, the browser will ask you to log in. If you’re already logged in, the post goes up automatically. So, with the add-on installed and active logins at multiple web services, you ask these services to do your bidding with one hotkey stroke and one line of text.
Ubiquity has grown out of a product called Enso, an open-source project originally developed by the start-up Humanized. When Mozilla snatched up Enso’s developers, the project went with them and has now emerged as this new UI for Firefox.
Here are some other commands:
tinyurl (generates a tiny URL for any long URL)
add-to-calendar (adds an event to Google Calendar, support for others soon)
check-calendar (give it a day or a date and it lists your GCal events)
calculate (any mathematical expression)
close-tab (plus a name, and it will close the relevant tab)
define (look up any word in Answers.com’s dictionary)
get-email-address (look up a contact name)
map (type any location to get a Google Map)
You can also instantly search sites like Amazon, Flickr, eBay, Google, MSN, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Yelp or YouTube. You can see results right there in the Ubiquity window (like this Wikipedia search). There are a dozen or so other commands like “view-source” and “Bugzilla” that are of special interest to web developers, plus some commands for interacting with web forms. With Ubiquity installed, you can see a full list at any time by typing “command-list.”
That’s a taste of what it can do right now, but even cooler is what’s on the horizon. One possibility is the ability to generate mashups on the fly by typing plain language commands. Say you’re looking at a set of apartment listings on Craigslist — type “map these” and you’ll see a map of all the apartments. Or, if you’re looking at a set of search results in Flickr, just type “make these into a slideshow.” The goal with Ubiquity is to allow a user to approach multiple web services at once and ask them to work together, but to do so as a normal human, not as a JavaScript programmer.
Check out Aza Raskin’s post on Mozilla Labs for more details, and to see a sampling of some of the types of applications the team hopes to see built with Ubiquity. Raskin also has a more in-depth post on his personal blog. Raskin was one of the original Enso developers who moved over to Mozilla at the beginning of 2008.
Also, he’s made a video:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
We’ll have more details after we’ve played with it for a while longer. But for now, this looks like an extremely useful tool with a great deal of promise. And best of all, real humans can start using it and improving their experiences on the open web right now.
