Mozilla Labs announced yesterday the release of the Initial Prototype of the latest project meant to connect the web with language - Ubiquity. From a quote on their blog, the folks over at Mozilla Labs hope to “find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”
Ok. So, what the heck does that mean? An example of what they are saying their program would be useful for could be this. You just snagged some concert tickets from a radio contest to a show happening tonight. Coolness. Only you haven’t been to this venue before, and neither has the friend that you’re emailing and inviting. Not so cool. Heck...you haven’t even heard of the band. Do you even know if you want to go? Is there anywhere to eat on the way? Now, normally, you’d have to be searching out the address on some mapping site, looking up the band for some info on them, copying all of this into an email (including either links or the map itself as well). Lots of typing, clicking, searching, copying, pasting, right? Well, this is some of what Ubiquity hopes to get rid of.
What they allow you to do is simply interact and tell the program what you want it to do by using language-based instructions. So, you could tell it to look up the address of Montage Mountain Toyota Pavilion, and the artist 36 Crazyfists, lookup nearby restaurants, and email the results to your buddy Jake.
Some people giving feedback on the program so far, seem to really love it. There are however those that simply don’t see it’s usefulness in the real world. And others that say all that typing is a pain in the rear. One suggestion that I saw, I thought was great. On the Mozilla Labs comment section, reader Chris Papadopoulos writes
“Say you’re reading a message board and somebody wrote, “Hey, did you guys hear that Linkin Park is playing at the Spectrum on Sept. 27th? I love that song of theirs My December. I can’t wait for that!”
Highlighting that bit of text, the system should quickly process it, and give you a menu that presents a few different options.
* a Wiki link for the music artist (the system should be intelligent enough through various grammatical cues and perhaps a quick wiki/google search)
* a link to the ticket purchase site
* plane tickets to Philadelphia (the system should be intelligent enough to realize that the Spectrum is in Philadelphia and you live far enough away to justify plane tickets
* create a new calendar event
* A Map of the region
* An Email this link
* A youtube link to that song’s video.This approach is definitely not as powerful as a command-line type system, but probably much more usable for the average person.”
I definitely think that if they move it into this type of UI, it would be even more effective and more widely received by the general population. Right now, I think it’s a kind of neat program, fun to play around with, with lots of potential....but I can’t really say it’s something I’ll be adopting into my daily routine.
Read [Mozilla Labs] Via [techmeme]
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