Ubiquity. Mash-ups the Easy Way

I stumbled across this last week and hadn't really had the time to sit down and take a closer look at it ... Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that enables a new approach to building user generated mash-ups for really useful reasons. I could go on about it, but the easiest way to understand it is to just watch the embedded video below from Mozilla Labs and jump over and read Aza Raskin's post about it at his own blog for some more details.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I am wondering what these kinds of simple tools can do for us in teaching and learning contexts. Now that we are seeing examples of things like Ubiquity I am really starting to think even more about what a powerful platform the web really is. When you give normal people the power to construct complex informational mash-ups with a few keystrokes things are getting good. I am going to spend some time playing with the early releases to see what can be done. Any ideas for a killer educational use for this?

Comments

[Alan Levine]

Ubiquity has been on my "cool stuff I need to get around to looking at someday" list, but thanks for the nudge to go look at it.

Perhaps not as much as "mashups" but what I see is a lot of potential to change the way we look at and use web-content. I really like the concept of the way it is used by natural action (highlight content) and pseudi natural language queries. But more than that, it migh be revolutionary in how we look at web content, long away from the self contained "page" and now to bits we can choose how to chop up and re-use.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined on Steroids!

Microformats might be a next big thing (finally for some). As far as the educational possibilities... thinking hat on....

[Bleach Wallpapers]

I tryed it, it's a good tools, but only for repetive task, nothing really newer than shortcuts.

[Cole Camplese]

Alan ... when I was mentioning mashups, I was talking about the ease in which components of the output from a Ubiquity call could be dropped into something like an email. The example in the screencast of actually dropping a map into an email was killer to me. I just love the idea of being able to actually create more meaning from all the pieces we have access to around the web.

The other thing I love is the AppleScript like ease of asking questions to make things happen. I am still excited for the day when I can do complex, multi-site activities from a single statement. A geek can dream!

[Peter Linehan]

This reminds me of Yahoo pipes a little bit. I wonder if that is still going?