Ben Adida wrote:
I don't think this one's been forwarded to the list yet. It's a lot more
"now" than the Aurora concept, and it clearly needs embedded metadata:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
Of course, they mention "Microformats" in passing, but this is a lot
like SearchMonkey in your browser: you really need to be able to add
your own fields and trigger actions based on the data.
I've been playing with it all day :)
This is well worth investing some time on, especially for RDFa
enthusiasts. There is a mode by which commands can be invoked with
command-click on a section of a document. Already even in this demo, the
list of potential actions/verbs is dauntingly large, so the ability to
use more information about the thing that bit of the doc describes
should have real impact and usefulness.
Funny you mention SearchMonkey; I spent the previous couple of days
working to integrate Google Social Graph API with Yahoo SearchMonkey
(both have FOAF/RDF offerings, though interestingly different). So
yesterday I was writing a proxy for Google SGAPI that turned its output
into DataRSS (Atom+RDFa) that SearchMonkey can consume. More on that
another time. What I started today with Ubiquity was basically the same
kind of code, but in clientside javascript. It takes a target URL (in
SearchMonkey this was a search hit; in Ubiquity it is the currently
viewed page). Then feeding this to Google SGAPI, you get a JSON response
which provides more URLs, photos, and other metadata about the person
whose page it is, from their FOAF and XFN.
The demo Ubiquity command I made here, http://danbri.org/2008/ubisg/
shows this data overlaid on the current page. It's pretty basic and
their is apparently a bug that makes their installation system fail. To
try it, copy/paste the .js text from the link in my page, invoke the
command-editor by running Ubiquity and typing 'command-editor', then
paste the .js into the textarea.
I really think the missing conceptual ingredient here is related to
David Huynh's Parallax,http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/ ... in the
flexible handling of sets of things. There was a little discussion today
in irc.mozilla.org #ubiquity about this, and the use of a 'these'
keyword in Ubiquity. Lots of interesting things to play with anyway...
cheers,
Dan
--
http://danbri.org/
