Hi again.

Looks like my role on this blog is slowly being more clearly defined – I get the fun job of posting about updates and prototypic versions of software we find ourselves enjoying here at Upstream. I’ll leave the higher-brow stuff for Alex.

Ubiquity, a unique, experimental and potentially groundbreaking extension for Mozilla Firefox, has been available for around 6 months now, so it’s not exactly a new concept. However, as part of the Mozilla Labs project, it’s not exactly well-known to those who don’t often delve into the development side of things.

The concept of the early alphas blew me away entirely but I had some problems getting it running properly on Firefox. I re-downloaded the latest version about a month back and have been playing around with it, and have found that it is quickly becoming integral to my daily surfing habits.

So, what does it do? Well, in the words of Mozilla Labs, it aims to “connect the web with language”. In real terms, it’s a command-based interface that helps you create user-generated mash-ups in seconds with simple, customisable, and extensible contextual commands. Say I want to search Flickr for pictures of the newest Asus Eee PC, the Eee 1000HE. Usually I’d have to go to Flickr (via typing the address into the address bar or selecting a bookmark), click in the Flickr search field, type “Eee 1000HE”, and press enter.

Surely in this day and age, we should be able to do something this simple – searching a website – without having to go through all the boring bits of actually going to the site and searching. Well, now we can. All I have to do here is press the Ubuiqity shortcut key – CTRL+SPACE by default – and type flickr 1000he. That’s it. The images appear within Ubiquity. If I press enter it takes me straight to the search results on Flickr, or I can click on one of the thumbnails to go straight to that photo’s page.

Bear in mind that this is just a very, very basic way to use Ubiquity – the real magic is in the way it generates the content that you need, and puts it wherever you want. Ubiquity is still very alpha, so this is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what this thing will eventually be able to do, but the way I can just throw my own mash-ups into email messages is so much simpler – not to mention quicker and more efficient – than going through the (now seemingly arduous) task of attaching files. I can send interesting pages to friends in a single command; I can update my Facebook status or Twitter without having to visit those sites; I can add appointments to my Google Calendar in a second, speaking to Ubiquity like I would do to a human being; I can translate foreign language websites in a completely instant, ad-hoc way… I’ve never felt so connected to something I use every day. The best thing is that people are constantly creating and releasing their own commands for sites and APIs not yet supported by Ubiquity, and you can really see how the community has embraced the concept of Ubiquity and the power it gives your browsing experience.

There have been launcher-type applications before (perhaps most famously Mac OSX’s built-in Spotlight), allowing people to press a shortcut key, type a short command and have the computer run a particular program or script; but I have never seen one as far-reaching and extensible, nor one that understands contextual commands and uses open APIs to perform such a potentially wide array of tasks.

The best way to explain Ubiquity properly is to see it in action – here’s Aza Raskin, currently Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs, giving a brief overview of some of the things Ubiquity can do.

Warning: may revolutionise internet.