I received a Tweet yesterday afternoon that led me to to a recent article over on the Mozilla Labs blog announcing the launch of a new Firefox Extension prototype called ‘Ubiquity’.

I installed and had a play around with Ubiquity last night and I have to admit it oozes potential. Even in it’s current manifestation it comes across as being pretty special.

What Ubiquity does is to bring together a wealth of other web resources and allows you to interact with them all from a single command line interface that you invoke by hitting the CTRL/Option and Space keys.

What this lets you do is call on multiple applications without actually having to physically visit the website of the resource you’re attempting to use.

Take for example this blog article. Using Ubiquity (and without ever moving away from this page), I could shorten the URL of the web address, post it to my Twitter feed, email it to a colleague using Gmail, and submit the article to Digg.

That’s really only the tip of the iceberg though. Whilst it’s still in early stages of development, you can see the sort of thing the developers are striving to achieve by taking a look at the screengrab below from the Mozilla blog:

For those who are squinting to read it, you can see the user has typed into Ubiquity the following text:

“Book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary, and add it to my calendar”

Can you imagine an application that would go away and do all of that for you without you even having to leave this web page?! It’s only when you start to think about things like this that you begin to appreciate the scope of the project.

If you fancy giving it a whirl (which I’d strongly recommend), then a link to install the extension can be found in Mozilla’s blog article (there’s also an interesting video show casing some of the applications current features). There’s a tutorial to get you started here and you can find a list of the default commands here (chrome://ubiquity/content/cmdlist.html if the hyperlink doesn’t work – you’ll probably need to have the extension installed first though). Don’t forget, there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own commands or subscribing to those that have been created by others.

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Bob Pullen.

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This entry was posted by Bob Pullen on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is tagged with firefox, mashup, mozilla, ubiquity, web apps and is posted in the category Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.