Re: Ubiquity

Ben Adida wrote:
> 
> I don't think this one's been forwarded to the list yet. It's a lot more
> "now" than the Aurora concept, and it clearly needs embedded metadata:
> 
> http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
> 
> Of course, they mention "Microformats" in passing, but this is a lot
> like SearchMonkey in your browser: you really need to be able to add
> your own fields and trigger actions based on the data.
>

I've been playing with it all day :)

This is well worth investing some time on, especially for RDFa 
enthusiasts. There is a mode by which commands can be invoked with 
command-click on a section of a document. Already even in this demo, the 
list of potential actions/verbs is dauntingly large, so the ability to 
use more information about the thing that bit of the doc describes 
should have real impact and usefulness.

Funny you mention SearchMonkey; I spent the previous couple of days 
working to integrate Google Social Graph API with Yahoo SearchMonkey 
(both have FOAF/RDF offerings, though interestingly different). So 
yesterday I was writing a proxy for Google SGAPI that turned its output 
into DataRSS (Atom+RDFa) that SearchMonkey can consume. More on that 
another time. What I started today with Ubiquity was basically the same 
kind of code, but in clientside javascript. It takes a target URL (in 
SearchMonkey this was a search hit; in Ubiquity it is the currently 
viewed page). Then feeding this to Google SGAPI, you get a JSON response 
which provides more URLs, photos, and other metadata about the person 
whose page it is, from their FOAF and XFN.

The demo Ubiquity command I made here, http://danbri.org/2008/ubisg/ 
shows this data overlaid on the current page. It's pretty basic and 
their is apparently a bug that makes their installation system fail. To 
try it, copy/paste the .js text from the link in my page, invoke the 
command-editor by running Ubiquity and typing 'command-editor', then 
paste the .js into the textarea.

I really think the missing conceptual ingredient here is related to 
David Huynh's Parallax,http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/ ... in the 
flexible handling of sets of things. There was a little discussion today 
in irc.mozilla.org #ubiquity about this, and the use of a 'these' 
keyword in Ubiquity. Lots of interesting things to play with anyway...

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 17:52:20 UTC