You know how I feel about the Internet. Now that I have it, you'd have to pry it out of my... well, out of my cold, dead hands, as the saying goes.
I instant message while I'm listening to Pandora (music) and writing a blog entry, at the same time I'm monitoring emails and my friends on Facebook, checking my emails, sending and reading tweets, looking up information for the article I'm writing - oh, and when I take a little break, I'm likely as not to spend a few minutes with an online game.
That's just business as usual for most of us that have adopted the Internet as part of the way we conduct business.
There have been plenty of efforts to integrate all this. I wrote about Flock recently, a web application that allows you to open all your social networking sites, web-based emails and other personalized websites in a single, tabbed interface. And then there are instant message aggregators, like Pidgen, which collect all you instant message identities in a single signon, so you can chat with all your friends, no matter which IM system they're on.
Now there's Ubiquity, from Mozilla Labs, an engine that proposes to let you harness a lot of the power of the Internet that has, thus far, been restricted to folks who can - and who have the time to - manipulate the actual code than runs the Internet.
I've written about the "semantic web" before - a way of objectifying language so that computers can do a better job of analyzing the masses of data available to it - and render that information useful to its human users.
Ubiquity is and "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:
At the heart of Ubiquity is the notion of the "mashup." You may be familiar with this concept from the music world. Remember the reworking of Elvis's "A Little Less Conversation?" It took the basic song, added new musical licks and rhythms, and created a whole new song - still retaining the essence of the original.
The initial release of Ubiquity would allow you, via your web browser (well, actually, via FireFox!), "map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all."
"Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do. The end goal is something like this:
"We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought."
Wanna play? Go here: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/ and download Ubiquity. Now mash something up.
Invent something clever? Send me an email and we'll publish it: nancyc.roberts@gmail.com.
I instant message while I'm listening to Pandora (music) and writing a blog entry, at the same time I'm monitoring emails and my friends on Facebook, checking my emails, sending and reading tweets, looking up information for the article I'm writing - oh, and when I take a little break, I'm likely as not to spend a few minutes with an online game.
That's just business as usual for most of us that have adopted the Internet as part of the way we conduct business.
There have been plenty of efforts to integrate all this. I wrote about Flock recently, a web application that allows you to open all your social networking sites, web-based emails and other personalized websites in a single, tabbed interface. And then there are instant message aggregators, like Pidgen, which collect all you instant message identities in a single signon, so you can chat with all your friends, no matter which IM system they're on.
Now there's Ubiquity, from Mozilla Labs, an engine that proposes to let you harness a lot of the power of the Internet that has, thus far, been restricted to folks who can - and who have the time to - manipulate the actual code than runs the Internet.
I've written about the "semantic web" before - a way of objectifying language so that computers can do a better job of analyzing the masses of data available to it - and render that information useful to its human users.
Ubiquity is and "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."
At the heart of Ubiquity is the notion of the "mashup." You may be familiar with this concept from the music world. Remember the reworking of Elvis's "A Little Less Conversation?" It took the basic song, added new musical licks and rhythms, and created a whole new song - still retaining the essence of the original.
The initial release of Ubiquity would allow you, via your web browser (well, actually, via FireFox!), "map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all."
"Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do. The end goal is something like this:
"We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought."
Wanna play? Go here: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/ and download Ubiquity. Now mash something up.
Invent something clever? Send me an email and we'll publish it: nancyc.roberts@gmail.com.
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