Ubiquity: Thank You
Last Tuesday, the community working on Ubiquity was five people. Half of us had never met face-to-face, we spanned three continents, and had written a couple dozen commands. Today, our community is thousands strong with contributes in every time zone. Innovation is pouring in from all directions—we’ve had thousands of commands written for Ubiquity; commands that fundamentally enhance the functionality of the browser. In under a week, we have a roughly comparable number of Ubiquity commands as there are Firefox extensions. That’s an amazing achievement. It highlights the power of enabling innovation edges and empowering such a generative community.
Wow. Simply wow. And thank you, everyone in the community. We all deserve a giant glass of champagne.
Mozilla Labs is a shared space for exploring future user experiences of the open Web. We don’t just have community—we are the community. A number of folks have said that the Ubiquity-style interaction heralds the beginning of Web 3.0. While that’s a bit too buzz-wordy for our tastes, with over a hundred thousand users, we do have a critical mass; one that that begins to shift the web from being site-centric to being task-centric.
Update
This weekend, the community was able to push out Ubiquity 0.1.1. You’ll be updated automatically if you’ve already installed Ubiquity; otherwise, you can get the latest version here.
Expect some major upgrades to the the Herd—Ubiquity’s command finder and dashboard service soon.
Some Links To Awesomeness
There has been too much awesomeness created by everyone in the community to highlight it all. I’ll call out just a spattering:
There is Lani Anglin-Rosales’s Top 35 Ubiquity Commands; Leslie Orchard’s walkthrough for creating a Delicious Ubiquity command; and Waleed Zuberi’s super-useful Ping.fm command. There’s Vladimir Prelovac’s open command, which shows how Ubiquity can be used to interact with the page’s current context; and, Robert Chen’s Xkcd command. Because, who doesn’t want the instant ability to insert obligatory Xkcd references. (Now, if it only let me insert the actually comic image instead of a link to one.)
Yatrik Solanki has done some wonderful design work and has turned us onto enabling skinning support for Ubiquity.
Abi Raja’s has made the excellent Keyscape which shows how Ubiquity can be used to write full-featured Firefox extensions. He’s also put out an amazing hack to enable command chaining. (Abi is one of the five original virtual team members.)
Finally, Skumleren.net has made some scientific ubiquity commands. I have a soft-spot in my heart for beautifully typeset equations. It’s my math and physics background, I’m sure. But it makes me knees weak. I’m looking forward to being able to plot from inside Ubiquity.
If others have contributions they’d like to call out, put them in the comments section or blog about them.
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