Ubiquity: the Future of Web Browsing

The future of the internet starts with this (currently prototype) project. See Ubiquity for Firefox demonstrated here. This is the ultimate usage for the internet.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

A project currently in 0.1/prototype has struck a newer with Getting-things-done fanatics everywhere. Ubiquity used to be called Enso and has recently moved to develop on the Firefox code base. In the work that’s been done, and the work that has yet to be done it’s clear that this is the next frontier of the internet: getting information formatted the way you want it everywhere….

Before I can describe this I have to talk about eras of personal computing: back in the ’90′s was the desktop-publishing era, a time when printers and word-processors were new, people could use fonts, colors, word-art, and many other publishing design concepts.  This was in a time before the internet offered connectivity that was useful, we were limited to email-so with our word processing documents we could email, save, and print them.  This essentially is what the ’80′s and ’90′s were.

In the late ’90′s multimedia was the new metaphor for computers; you work in Microsoft Office then listen to music, watch videos, etc all on the same computer box.  In the late ’90′s and ealy ’00′s Apple introduced an iMac model called “DV”.  This computer, aside from a different case design, more memory, and a somewhat faster processor, offered a software product called “iMovie” and the computer contained a Firewire (i.Link, IEE1394a, whatever you want to call it) to connect to your camcorder.  iMovie allowed you to create videos and to compress to share videos.  At the time that was amazing and required a lot of time to get a little done, as computers of that time weren’t fully capable of multimedia as they are today.  iMovie could share movies to you website, back to the camcorder to share to a VCR, or iMovie could email your video to a friend.  Later, a few years later Apple phased in iDVD to make professional looking DVDs for you movie (when DVD disc burning drives became affordable).

The next era has been a progression from the previous two-online “Web 2.0″ applications.  As servers became smarter they could execute code locally and generate HTML for users, as the content changed, or make HTML to suit the users’ browser (this was introduced unsuccessfully by NeXT back in the mid ’90′s called WebObjects, Microsoft has a technology called WebServices which requires software on a users machine and on the server, but what I’m talking about is web based applications which run on the server, unknown to the user.  A good example is Amazon or GMail).  Some applications that are based off this technology are Stickam, UStream, GMail, Facebook, Hotmail, some Windows Live solutions, Amazon, and many more sites.  As these sites became more popular generating HTML pages developers began to realize the power of these programs, which lies in the foundation of these solutions.

What these solutions have always used and is what’s powering the next era of computing is the fact that these dynamic web sites are driven by Databases.  This fact means that there can be more than one output, a common example is a site that has an RSS feed.  Since all of the content can be formatted as an XML document using a common structure, and commands have been released in APIs (like Twitter) so that you can use a web site’s service without using the website.  A user could use Twitter and never see the twitter.com site, instead using applications like Twitterific, twhirl, twinkle, and many more twitter clients.

The point is that many modern sites make available these APIs to developers and that this will fuel the next era, ultimate connectivity.  When a developer gets a stream of information from the API it can be formatted in anyway the developer feels it should, so this means that you can integrate services together into making information accessible anywhere, anytime.  Ubiquity for Firefox is the first big step in that direction.

Ubiquity allows users using the Ubiquity for Firefox plug-in to hit a key command (like Alt-Space) and type in some natural-language command and the software does the rest.  The video at the top of the post demonstrates this concept in several situations and explains essentially everything I’ve written in a five-minute video.
You can try this now, but remember that this is an early development version.

The future of information can only get better, and in my next post I’ll give my thoughts on a mobile (possibly iPhone like) device which will use these services, anywhere, literally.