This is one of the best screencasts I’ve ever seen: It comes to us from Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs.
The screencast introduces Ubiquity for Firefox, a plug-in still in its early stages that will turbocharge your Firefox browser. As the Mozilla Labs blog says:
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.This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric. …
[Ubiquity’s goal is to] enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.
(In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix
the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or
what they are doing.) …Ubiquity 0.1:
Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate
on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg
and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax
highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to
see them all.
It’s something early adopters will embrace at the outset, but soon all of us will be inserting maps into our emails, translating pages on the fly, and presenting data in the way we want to see it. Congratulatons to Mozilla on this exciting step forward.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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