Open Source Ubiquity Enables User-Generated Mashups

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

Mozilla Labs has announced the launch of Ubiquity. Ubiquity empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.) And it enables on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyubone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Ubiquity lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the  GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license as well.

Requirements: –
Demo: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
License: GPL/MPL/LGPL Tri-License