Aza Raskin at Mozilla Labs thinks there’s got to be an easier way to create Web mashups. Today, he is announcing the launch of Ubiquity, an experiment in using natural language to invoke Web services. Ubiquity is an extension to the Firefox browser that lets you type in what you want to do—insert a map, translate this page, Twitter this block of text, search on Google—and invokes one of 30 Web services. As Raskin describes the problem in his post:
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.
With Ubiquity, all you do is type in map, and it calls up the Google Map and sticks it in your e-mail. Just as you type what you want into a search box and it figures out what you are looking for, Ubiquity tries to figure out which services you want to access. In a phone call, Raskin explains it to me this way:
Ubiquity is an experiment in connecting the Web with language. The problem with the Web is that services and locations and data are disconnected. You want to send a link to a map, translate a Web page, convert things to PDF, add a review for a restaurant—all of these things you want to do right now, but you have to trundle around the Web to do it. Ubiquity is instant access to services through language.
This is an ambitious project whose goal is to make natural language into a programming interface. It is open-source so anyone can contribute to make it work with more APIs and Web Services. The prototype extension can be downloaded at the link above and includes tutorials for how to create new commands. More detailed information is also available here and in the video below (which shows how Ubiquity can create and insert a Google map and Yelp review in an email, map multiple Craigslist listings simply by highlighting them, look up a definition or Wikipedia entry, and Twitter it automagically).
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
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link doesnt work
Why are techcrunch articles so odd when it comes to linking? I can almost never find the link to the actual service being written about. Just go through the last 10 articles about a new website web service… 90% of them only have a buried textual link.
Some kind of inner techcrunch SEO magic?
The original link is here: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/0.....-ubiquity/
Looks fascinating, can’t wait to try it out.
Opera Voice competitor? http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/voice/
This is extremely reminiscent of quicksilver. The tight integration into the web browsing experience is a real bonus for power users, however I don’t see command-line based interfaces (as pretty as this may be) as being practical for the average user.
I think the mashup nomenclature has got to go. This is using resources to pull relevant information. Mashup of services, yes, but is that even necessary.. Do we call a AP newspaper article published with a photo by an independent source a mashup?
That being said, I cannot wait to take this for a spin.
wow Aza is great. What a forward looking guy.
straight application from his Enso product to the web. More utility here. Great work.
wow finally someone thought of a good reason to use mash ups
Intel is working in a similar concept as well! By the way this is simply the quicksilver approach applied to web 2.0
P.S. Bum in the video
Yet Another Argument for Microformats & DataPortability.
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Data Portability Fan Page
Narrator seems to be having trouble defining it clearly. Is it ‘do something with selected text’? Is it ‘Embed stuff in an HTML editor’? It’s just all over the place.
Very cool. Natural language + mashups provide for some really fun possibilities.
We (Orchestr8) released a Firefox extension (AlchemyPoint) around a year ago based on this same concept (type in what you want to do—insert a map, translate this page, Twitter this block of text, search on Google).
In practice, however, we’ve seen our users usually prefer using the provided graphical tools, versus crafting natural language commands. Or, if they’re using natural language, commands rarely exceed 5 or 6 words.
It will be interesting to see if these sort of approaches ever gain traction with those outside the “power-user” communities. Ubiquity looks like a great tool, I look forward to giving it a whirl!
I’d like to see the time frame in rolling this out. Natural language projects seem to be developing into the mainstream slowly and without much praise. Is this really feasible?
Doesn’t anyone read the article? You can already download a prototype:
https://people.mozilla.com/~avarma/ubiquity-0.1.xpi
Once the text is highlighted and the extension pops up a window, couldn’t icons from the disparate services appears in a horizontal scroll bar instead of the command line?
Kind of reminds me of greasmonkey.
F* tards
To be serious, you must make a comment about other similar projects like Lotus Mashups, many videos are already available at:
http://www.youtube.com/results.....arch_type=
And you can gather extra information at: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/qedwiki/
works great! cant beleave its a prototype. a masterpiece add on!
@Ben Ackles I couldn’t agree more. I am trying to lead the charge to move to microformats in my community. I can’t wait to test this out at home.
I like the idea, but I found the demonstration somewhat unconvincing. Would I really go through that much trouble to send my friend an invitation to lunch? I doubt that. That should work the opposite way - I write a short notice like “What about lunch tomorrow at Elite Cafe in SF, 1pm?” and then on the other side my friend will be able to select “Elite Cafe in SF” and get the map, reviews, etc.
And I was really impressed with craigslist example for several seconds, until I remembered that in most cases posts have no address.
Hmmm…
Replacing copy and paste with typed words; and an AI interface smart enough to understand my personalized short cuts. Is this one step forward, two steps back?
Very cool. I’ve been playing with it lately and it seems awesome. I actually prefer quickly accessing things via the command prompts. However I think the future would be better integrated into firefox in general. This way it’s largely adopted amongst a big crowd and you can see faster development. For a prototype it works exceptionally well though.
I use key breeze to access everything on my PC, now I’ll use this to access things via the web. I don’t see people largely picking it up though until it’s gained more interesting scripts and user base.
I will wait to try this out, it looks good.
Arghhhh so cool!
I love these guys, i cant wait to use it!!!!!!
Brilliant!
@Eric S.
One of the things I look for in TechCrunch are the mention(s) of competing or similar products. What’s missing is that this is quicksilver territory, as mentioned by 2 comments.
So many critics out there. Well why dont some of you critics develop something….
Use the time you spend hammering others and put that time into developing something half descent.
@ Dash Chang….. have you used it yet?
@ Danny….. I see where you are coming from but it is so quick to mash and if im the reciever i would appreciate having it all in one.. its just easier in my opinion.
cheers..
There are various existing implementations of this in the real-world. Specifically, last year we released Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress that as you type detects places of interest, products, addresses, companies, etc. and then associates maps, product info, company/stock info, etc. to those detected terms — integrated within the Wordpress text-editor. There is no copy and pasting or embeding code — its as easy as Approving/Rejecting the recommending map or stock quote info. It can be improved and extended to support more entities and the user interface integration with the Wordpress editor, however the core elements are all there.
This is seriously revolutionary. The introduction video is seriously amazing and great.
But, while using the TWITTER command in Ubiquity, it says, you can post 160 CHARACTERS. YOU CAN’T. content after 140 Chars GET TRUNCATED.
(now, that’s a silly problem. Not finding fault with it.)
Remeber, this is just ALPHA, that too, first prototype.
The final release will be terribly better than what it is now.
SOOOOOOOOOOPER
This software walks very well
Very interesting post
wanna see a cool mashup of craigslist? check out http://clhack.com
Try this much better http://lifehacker.com/index.ph.....906c2a42d1.