Living Critic

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs that promises to introduce a terrific new concept in, I hesitate to say, web browsing.

Similar to how files are handled in Quicksilver, Ubiquity takes it’s cue from web services, bringing them together as functions accessible immediately within your browser.

Want to add a map to the message your sending?  select the location text, activate Ubiquity with an “option+space” and type “map.” 

Like Quicksilver most anything can be accessed just typing in a few intuitive commands.  Ubiquity has the potential to tie in any number of services including Google Maps, Amazon, Ask.com, Yelp, Digg, Ebay, Flickr, Weather.com.  Considering this is a beta, many more products could be integrated.  

This extends and brings sites together in a way that goes beyond just browsing and almost creates a new “clipboard” or some would say “Quicksilver-like” functionality to the Web.

I think it has a lot of potential if it can be simple and intuitive enough to gain some adoption traction.  I also think it’s potentially a huge money maker for a company like Mozilla as companies will want to rank higher as default solutions tied into Ubiquity, similar to how Google currently pays Mozilla for add revenue generated through the Mozilla browser, these other services will want a piece of the action if this technology takes off.

In some ways this application also has a potential to supplement and in some cases supplant “search” as a frequently utilized tool for getting things done.

I’m looking forward to seeing what form this may take going further, and what type of adoption we’ll see.

Ubiquity is working great on my Mac, and it’s supposed to do well on MS Windows as well, Linux requires some extra setup at this early development stage if you want to try it out.

Check out the video here:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thanks to bytemonkey for the tip.