A map of the Isle of Man
Isle of Man

Testing if this works …

Hmmm .. inserting into the post didn’t seem to work, the code is being generated, but Google Maps reports a malformed URL. Here’s what I see:

Let’s try something else:

Weather in the Isle of Man:

Can see it, but can’t insert into post. The interface works well, and the functionality can be extended quite easily, so I’m expecting great stuff from this! Must spend some more time on the tutorial

Here’s a short video that demonstrates that it’s all about:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

What Ubiquity achieves is an alternative interface to harnessing the power of the services that already exist on the web (though I won’t go as far as using the buzzword Web Services). It’s an idea that has been proven through Mashups, however this power can now be accessed through natural language, just type what you want into the Ubiqity interface. It looks like a great piece of technology (although not ground-breaking) and has even made Scoble promise not to use IE8! I’ve installed it on this machine and will have a play, just remember it’s still a prototype and so might be a bit flaky.

Personally, I’m really happy to see this development as what it does is makes the browsing experience more useful to people who don’t have the technical skills to build stuff from scratch. Casual users shouldn’t need to learn those skills, just as you shouldn’t need to learn how to rebuild a carburettor is you want to drive a car. There’s even more information about this on Techmeme, so start reading!