Ubiquity is a natural language web service connector for Firefox.
That’s clear. Right? … I can already feel you thinking, “Man! I’ve been looking for one of those!”
What it does is let you bring up a dialog, type “email this to mel,” for instance, and it emails the page that you’re looking at to Mel. (It’s like Quicksilver, if you’re a Mac person — or like a command line for the web, if you’re a Unix person.)
But that’s an easy example.
“translate this page” is another. You’re looking at a page in Japanese, bring up the Ubiquity dialog, type ‘translate,’ and now you can read the page in broken, computer-translated English — but that’s a big step forward.
It also brings the web to, say, your email. You’re trying to describe a location to a friend. You bring up ubiquity, you type “map,” it brings up Google maps, you navigate to the view of the map you want, you click ‘insert,’ and the map is now inserted into your email.
Services (Ubiquity “verbs”) can be developed and provided by any developer — the explosion of Ubiquity verbs is gated only by a developer’s desire to have one.
This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in web development since RSS. The possibilities are awesome and vast for managing the data on the web and pushing it around the way you want. — Or maybe it’ll just make Twitter even easier to use.
Check it out!
