Occasionally a tool comes along that could change the way we do stuff online. Most fail by either being too elegant and therefore offering not enough change or even a ‘wow factor’ to get end users to change their approach or they are over rich with features and tweakability to make them pretty much unusable - even though the value added service(s) they provide are actually quite useful.
Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity may just change that.
before I go any further watch this truly awesome video
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Now… was that not truly amazing!
The power of being able to perform anything from definition look ups, to viewing encyclopaedia entries, to adding rich content into an email, to translating a page on the fly all without leaving the browser interface - not even navigating browser tabs.
This is really putting the vision of using semantics not only to connect the web, well web applets and tools, but it’s got the potential of truly levelling off the participatory learning curve. Embedding semantic commands (verb based shortcuts) will empower users. Users will feel connected to the browsing experience and therefore more in control of the tool their using.
The ’send this’ command is awesome. I had a bit of difficulty with the mapping function though… ah well it is still an alpha tool
I’m off to explore some more..
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