Mozilla Ubiquity puts mashups in reach of the non-technical

Last week Mozilla introduced a tool it claims puts mashup capability--the ability to mix and match different services within a single application--in the hands of the non-technical end user. Mozilla Ubiquity, which is still in early Beta, uses a simple command-based language that enables you to mix services right in the browser window. For example, say you are writing an email in GMail and you want to include a Google map. Even though these services are part of the same Google family, you still need to take a step to find the map and insert a link to it in your mail. As Aza Raskin of the Ubiquity team points out in his blog post introducing Ubiquity, this is a primitive way of dealing with mixing services. At this stage of the web's evolution (especially of Web 2.0), it seems there should be a better way.

With Ubiquity, you can enter the name and address of a business in your email, highlight it, open Ubiquity with a simple key command, and enter the command 'Map it.' Like magic, the map (not just a link) is inserted in your email. Although Raskin makes clear that Ubiquity is still very much in the early stages of development, it offers the promise of integrated services and data, something that is clearly missing from the current web experience. It should be very interesting to see where this technology goes, and how others provide similar ways to mix and match services to make the web much more useful and user friendly than it is today.

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