Aza Raskin of Mozilla introduces a new experimental (alpha 0.1) project, called Ubiquity, a power user’s CLI extension for Firefox. It integrates Google Maps/Translate/Gmail, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, TinyURL,… and allows the user to mashup content himself, through a command line. It’s very similar to PodiPodi, Catalog/Devo extension, but being developed backed by the Mozilla community.

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions.

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Three minutes into the video, a demo of Craigslist and mapping a number of rental unit addresses, and the note that this would take advantage of microformatted data, exactly like my own little project, Mapanui.

You can extend Ubiquity by writing your own commands (and share them with the world), using JavaScript. Ubiquity also uses the fab jQuery library (obviously) for rapid JavaScript development (though not using $ but jQuery for compatibility).

A nice push for microformats and an Open Web.

Something to keep an eye on, and look forward to full Firefox 4 integretion.

Category: Javascript, Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: Aza Raskin, browser, firefox, Microformats, open Web APIs

Yahoo earlier (in March) proclaimed to embrace the Semantic web:

LinkedIn is to mark up user profile pages with microformats. Yahoo search could then understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search.

Last week then Yahoo introduced a number of changes to its default search experience to add more structured data to results using SearchMonkey widgets.

Yahoo SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans