Tuesday, August 31, 2010

An experiment to make the web more connected

Here's a web concept that is simple yet overlooked. The things we use the web for are disconnected. Here are some examples:

Let's say you're composing an email to some folks announcing a get-together at your house. You can go to a mapping site and get a link to a map of your place, then put the link in your email. Or you could take a screen shot of the map and insert the picture into your email. But you can't just put the whole functional map in your email.

If you want to email some friends about a great restaurant you've been to and want to include the review, you can paste a link to the review, but you can't just put the whole (readable) review into your email that if clicked, opens other reviews on the same place.

The other thing that's inadequate about the web is that if you want to define a word, you have to go to a dictionary site, then type in the word. You can't just type 'define ubiquitous' in your address bar and expect anything useful to appear. If you're on a site and you want to email it to someone, you have to open your email program (or web mail site), find (or remember) someone's email address, add it to the TO: field, then copy and paste the current URL into a new message and send it.

Wouldn't it be cool though, if you could just from the web page you're at type 'email to jon' and it instantly opens your email resource of choice, adds jon's address and copies the current URL into the message? How about you highlight an address and type 'map this' and voila - Google maps provides you with a map that you can then insert right into: your email, blog entry, whatever. Or select some foreign language text and type 'translate this' and the selected text is instantly translated into English (or other language of choice).

Well, Mozilla Labs had been working on just such a project, called Ubiquity. Too bad that it has been abandoned. The good news is that the user community has adopted the add-on and are writing additional commands to make the add-on even more usable. Let's go to the video, shall we?

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