Wow. Just learned of this new Mozilla Labs project (Ubiquity) over at TechCrunch.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
I’ll have to wait for a few hours before I try it.
I’m curious as to whether people who aren’t completely comfortable with html, web 2.0 and the likes would be willing to use something like this. A friend recently asked me to show them how to send pictures and videos from the web to other websites (e.g. embedding a picture as a myspace comment). A lot of sites have the code already for you but you have to push a couple buttons that seem like magic.
I’m curious if this friend would find something that made it all easier, well, any easier – or if it would appear far too technical.
If it saves me a few minutes of copying, pasting, and/or formatting I’m all for it.
But then again, I rarely send a map in an e-mail, if I need to tell somewhere where something is and they know there way around the web I can tell them to “look it up” – but if they’re not familiar I’ll generally resort to printing out a hard-copy for them, or send them a nicely formatted link (one that simply says “click here”) so they can find it themselves.
Will something like Ubiquity make me send more maps and reviews to people? Probably.
Will they like receiving more maps and reviews? I don’t know – I suppose it depends on who receives them. Some people may thank me for saving them the time of looking things up, while others might complain that they got something weird in my last e-mail they didn’t understand (e.g. older relatives).
John Trendler: Still Learning 