Mozilla’s Ubiquity

Aza Raskin has been keeping busy.  Mozilla announced an early prototype of Ubiquity this week. They bill it as a command line for the web; if you’re a Mac user, think of it as somewhat like Quicksilver or LaunchBar. You can use a special key combination that will let you start typing a command, with the tool suggesting likely completions and executing whatever command you specify.  There’s an obvious lineage here from Enso, Aza’s previous work, although the shift from the Windows desktop to the Web is an interesting one that arguably opens more opportunities.

The early examples are a little simple (why do all mashups seem to center around maps?), but they hint at some possibilities that could be quite intriguing down the road (although for me to really start using it they’d have to tie in with my desktop apps; I like web services, but I’m not a all-web-all-the-time convert). It’ll be interesting to see what they (and others) do with it.