KungPowThinking

Very cool stuff people. Mozilla’s Ubiquity and MS IE 8 Beta 2. Two different takes trying to solve very similar problems. I think I smell a very interesting trend.

The problem:

• The Web as we use it today is only very loosely connected through hyperlinks or developer created mashups. Even though the business environment on the Web has shifted slightly toward openness, mashups are limited by technical issues like API’s and business relationships. User don’t care about either. They just want to add maps to email and tell their friends about it.

Ubiquity is all about empowering users to create their own mashups leveraging natural language. To use and visualize data and functionality provided by various sites as they see fit. Ubiquity has real potential to put an end to the limitations of walled gardens, and finally put the power in the hands of the people. It’s in super early Alpha release and there are definitely some challenges ahead, but I really dig it. Check out Aza Raskin’s blog and the Mozilla site for Ubiquity to find out more. My quick take, this is exactly the kind of thing that could make the Web exciting again. Only limitation is that it looks to be linked directly to Firefox. It would be even cooler if it could stay away from the browser wars altogether. Something like QuickSilver by Blacktree or Enso by Humanized. I also wonder how ubiquitous something leveraging “natural language” can be. I mean - which language? Note: if Aza reads this, I’d love to lend a UX hand with Ubiquity. Seriously.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

IE 8 seems to be Microsoft’s attempt to solve the same problem through Accelerators and WebSlices. Accelerators are contextual services accessible via highlighting web page content and clicking the Accelerators icon. Developers can build Accelerators for their services and users can install them on IE 8. Webslices let users save sections of web pages for future access - not unlike Apple’s Widgets which should be no surprise. Microsoft’s solution is definitely further along than Ubiquity, but it still relies on developers to build the Accelerators and doesn’t rely on natural language parsing black magic.

On a side note: I’ve always thought it strange that MS causes complete software development nightmares for itself by trying to build operating systems that work on just about any hardware configuration users can splice together, but still can’t come to terms with relinguishing control of software development. Reminds me of Steve Ballmer’s famous freakout - “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” I’ve always considered good developers to be scarce resources. It’s gotta be tough to be a company that makes a ton of money selling developers the tools to build consumer products while still trying to sell consumer products yourself. I’d prefer to see a CEO running around a stage yelling, “people, people, people, people” or even “customers, customers, customers, customers” wouldn’t you?