Ubiquity @ FOWA Miami

Recently our team was at FOWA and saw a demo of Ubiquity from the Mozilla Foundation.

So what’s Ubiquity? In simple terms Ubiquity is purported to be a really new cool way to interact from your browser with your desktop applications by using natural language commands.

Watch a demo by Aza Raskin on Ubiquity. That’s probably better than me trying to explain how it works. Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words.

You can download Ubiquity if you’d like to try it out yourself. I downloaded it as I got home and played around with it for a few hours. Keep in mind though that it’s still in beta.

I highly recommend trying it out – very simple to launch (ctrl + spacebar brings up ubuiqity in FF)

When I talked about with some other folks who had heard about Ubiquity their main concern was how long it would take them to learn how to use it since you need to remember the commands. (Are we going back to the days of DOS?

I think the key to Ubiquity being ubiquitous is its learnability – how quickly people will be able to learn and remember the commands. For now, I’m pretty excited by its potential.