The ‘Ubiquitous’ web

Image via Wikipedia All of you know about it already, but I shall happily add to the noise. Last evening I had one of those “Holy S**t” moments. Was sitting in a coffee shop, catching up with the days news, when I saw a flurry of activity on Friendfeed around Ubiquity. Turns out Ubiquity is a new project by Mozilla Labs, which for want of a better description is like Quicksilver for the browser, a mini command line available with an Alt-space.

Ubiquity is still young, and may never catch on although I have a feeling it will, at least among the geek crowd, and being a Firefox plugin = low friction. But you can see the promise right away. You can, very quickly, using simple commands access search, Wikipedia, maps, insert material into documents, send email, etc.

Here are some examples

But that’s just a start. It doesn’t take a leap of faith to see entire vocabularies being created to support certain data types and activities. An early example comes from Rajarshi Guha, who very quickly rustled up a couple of commands. Maybe we can have a repository somewhere someday for a set of standardized commands in bioinformatics/cheminformatics

The example above isn’t quite working perfectly, but you can see what we can do, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of mashups possible, including getting related papers, targets, compounds, structures, and being able to package them up and email them, or put them in a document, and as our web gets a little more structured, I can imagine myself sitting inside that command line and following an entire graph of information that streams through, ready to be manipulated and used for something even more interesting.

The web is a moving target, our browsers are moving targets, our capabilities to manipulate are moving targets, and efforts like Ubiquity show us a glimpse into the future. Will be fun being part of that future (and blogging about it)

Update: I should have known Pawel would take a stab. An even cooler example (Sorry Rajarshi, I like proteins better)

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