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Mashups have made our lives easier presently but the problems and hassle related to their development (not every Tom, Dick and Harry can create one) plus they appear to be focused more on what the site is instead of being user centric, thus limiting the overall experience despite making a few things easier. There is always a room for improvement and especially when it comes straight into your lap without doing anything except for utilizing what’s been tossed towards you.
Aza Raskin from Mozilla labs have made an announcement of giving a bite what comes to be a big step ahead for Mashups by introducing Ubiquity as he puts it to be “An experiment into connecting the Web with language.”
The idea of doing a multiple tiny tasks in order to complete one appears to be very boring and more importantly wasting a lot of time. Mailing a friend, informing him about a destination you two would like to meet, finding the place on the map, attaching it, copying links, the whole thing kills the actual plan and this is exactly why Ubiquity has come up in the Web Sphere.
So what exactly does Ubiquity do? It enables users to work around with a new interface which lets them do common tasks much more efficiently. What exactly does Ubiquity does is to Empower, Enable and Extend functionality beyond the traditional use and make the experience far more effective.
The most fascinating feature is that it does not require a user to be a hardcore language expert, instead let them instruct the browser to do exactly what they want to do (typing, speaking). So it’s more like an assistant waiting for you to give in a command for it to execute. How easy it sounds to speak ‘send an email to bob’ and the browser does that for you; to be short and precise ‘EASY’.
What I see with Ubiquity is something plain and simple; natural and user friendly. I was impressed with ease with which the platform works, having commands and putting the entire thing up for Ubiquity to do, helpful to the very end. It would save me so much time I waste attaching files, scheduling, adding maps etc. BUT I was a bit turned off when the add-on after installation asked for a browser restart. I mean doesn’t that appear too old? I hope developers at Mozilla labs do something about this nagging feature as well.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
