Today I installed the free Firefox plugin Ubiquity and was amazed by the new concept and the possibilities it unfolds for both users and web developers alike.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

While you certainly can read more about Ubiquity yourself… I was very impressed by a variety of functions that have already come in handy for me.

Contemplating a trip to Central America I have had to look at many pages which are often in spanish. It’s annoying to have to refer to babelfish or google translate constantly and I’ve often wished a translation could be done on the fly by selecting text and letting Firefox handle the rest. Enter Ubiquity.

First I go to a spanish speaking website…

I highlight the text and then type “translate” into Ubiquity. I hit enter and it translates the entire text in the page itself.

Then lastly I select the newly translated text and pull up the screen for Ubiquity and type “email” which then automatically opens up Gmail and composes an email with the text that I have selected.

All I can say is that’s just plain brilliant. You can do all kinds of things with ubiquity. You can select a phrase or word and then:

• translate the text to english
• google map it
• email it
• get a definition
• look it up in wikipedia
• search Google for it
• and a whole lot more!

I can see increasingly that as web services and open API’s get more prevalent that tools like Ubiquity will become an everyday part of our browsing experience. Huge kudos to the team behind the concept!

Also here’s a good video on the concept:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Open Source, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.