Make Your Web Life Easier With Ubiquity – An Innovative Firefox Plugin

Ubiquity is a very useful and user friendly Firefox plugin to make your life easier. This innovative plugin helps when you:

• Are planning to have a meeting with your friends
• Want to tell your friends about some new thing
• Want to share your experience
• Want to translate something
• Want to extract something to send
• Are looking to send some a location map

The Problem

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to.  You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message
composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed.  This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task.  And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

A Solution

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.

For more details:

Visit website: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

User Tutorial: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial