An Experiment in Scotch

If you are a Fire­fox user, I highly sug­gest installing Ubiq­uity. It’s a cur­rent exper­i­men­tal plu­gin for Fire­fox but it’s begin­ning to change how I surf the web, send things to peo­ple and in gen­eral, how I inter­act with the browser.

Ubiq­uity is an attempt to use nat­ural lan­guage to inter­act with the browser. You can do things like email links, map addresses and search the web using nat­ural lan­guage instead of try­ing to men­tally map what you want into the lan­guage of the browser.

Just a few quick exam­ples: Lots of times you run across a page that you’d like to send to a friend. To do that, you have to copy the link, open up your email client, type their address, write a sub­ject and then paste the link in which typ­i­cally doesn’t include any infor­ma­tion about what the link is or why you’re send­ing it. Enter Ubiq­uity. Let’s say I want to send the Ubiq­uity announce­ment above to Kat. First I call up Ubiq­uity by hit­ting Control-Space which launches the small screen in the left cor­ner of the browser as you can see below.

Once I’ve done that, I can tell Ubiq­uity what I want to do. In this case, I want to email it to Kat. Cur­rently, Ubiq­uity only sup­ports Gmail but since every­one and their dog has a Gmail account, I don’t see this as a prob­lem. I type the “email this to Kathryn” in the Ubiq­uity win­dow. Ubiq­uity knows that “this” refers to this page and it looks up Kathryn in my con­tacts. I can arrow down to the entry I want.

When I hit enter, I get a new email mes­sage with every­thing filled out for me. I can add some text but all the man­ual stuff is done.

There are ton of other ways to use Ubiq­uity includ­ing maps. One of the coolest is ways hap­pens when you’re already on a page with some text that you’re curi­ous about. You can high­light the text and then call up Ubiq­uity to give you sug­ges­tions about. For exam­ple, if you high­lighted a city in a story and started Ubiq­uity, you’d have the option to map it, google, get the weather for it, search Wikipedia for it, etc.

This is where the web should be going in the future. There are still some rough edges to Ubiq­uity but it’s a pretty damn cool start.