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The Ultimate List of Custom Ubiquity Verbs – ReadWriteWeb.

An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

Motivation

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local
San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d
like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of
message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map
site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and
finally copying all links into the message being composed. This
familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching,
copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you
haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links
to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the
Web, because there’s no easy way other than copy-and-paste to get
your data between one web-application and another. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of
the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left
trundling between web sites to perform common tasks. This results in
frustration and wasted time.

Web developers have another problem: if they have some simple
functionality that they want to make available to users, they can
either build a web application or a web browser extension. Both methods
require writing a lot of boilerplate code and developing a user
interface from scratch, resulting in frustration and wasted time for
developers, too. Creating simple functionality should be simple, and so
should sharing it with others.

Goals

Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs
experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find
new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do
common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Make it extremely easy to Extend browser functionality, and share new functionality with other users.
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with
  existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not
  just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no
  matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Empower users to control the web browser using a
  natural-language-like command interface. (With search, users type what
  they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Use Trust networ

With all the news about Chrome, it’s been pretty easy to forget about one of Firefox’s recent releases: Ubiquity. We gave Ubiquity a rave review
for giving Firefox a whole new UI. The standard commands, or “verbs”,
that come with Ubiquity are great. Yet we couldn’t help but want more.
Developers have been working around the clock to produce some fantastic
custom verbs for Ubiquity. Here is ReadWriteWeb’s list of the top picks
of custom Ubiquity verbs!

Media

Ubiquity already comes with built in search commands for Youtube,
Amazon, and Flickr. Here are our top picks for searching media sites
using custom Ubiquity verbs:

• Last.FM – Allows users to search the Last.FM music network for artists pages.
• Seeq – Search Seeqpod for music.
• Vimeo – Allows users to search Vimeo for matching video results.
• Stickam – Watch the livestream of your Stickam friends no matter what page you’re on.
• Netflix Search – Search Netflix for movies.

Social Networks

So far Ubiquity only allows you to interact with one social network:
Twitter. With these custom verbs you’ll be able interact with more
popular social networks.

• Ping. FM – Update your default Ping.FM status.
• Jaiku – Update your Jaiku status.
• Identica – Update your identi.ca status
• Facebook – Update your Facebook status or locate a friend.
• FriendFeed – Post a link or comment to your FriendFeed stream.
• Twitter and Link Shortner – Extends Ubiquity’s default Twitter functionality to include a link shortening command.
• Myspace Person Search – Search for someone on Myspace.

Social Sharing and Bookmarking Sites

Outside of Digg, there are no other ways to share news and links
with friends. So for those of you on Reddit, Delicious, and other
related sites, we have just the verbs for you!

• StumbleUpon – Stumble the current page you’re viewing. Requires StumbleUpon extension.
• Sphinn – Submit an article to Sphinn.
• Reddit – Submit a link to Reddit
• Twine – Post an article to Twine.
• Delicious – Bookmark an article with tags to your delicious account.
• Share On – Share a link on any of the following sites: Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, or Fark.
• Most Popular on Delicious – Get a quick overview of the current 10 most popular delicious bookmarks.
• Google Bookmark – Add the current page you’re viewing to your Google Bookmarks.
• Instapaper – Save a page for later to your Instapaper account.
• Soup.io – Bookmark a page to your Soup.io account.
• Tumblr – Share a ton of link love to your Tumblelog.
• Check Slashdot – Get a quick overview of either three of the latest articles on Slashdot or any number of articles that you specify.

Notable Verbs

While searching for the best Ubiquity verbs we came across a ton
that were great, but couldn’t be categorized. Without further ado here
are other notable verbs:

• Subscribe via Google Reader
• Multiple URL Shortners (TinyURL, isgd, Bitly, Hurl)
• EveryStock Photo Search
• Find Movie Times Near You
• W3C Validator
• Torrent Search
• 30 Boxes
• Remember The Milk

And The Verbs Keep Coming

We’re sure you’ll be able to find a ton of new Ubiquity verbs to
subscribe to. What we’d like to know is what verbs you’re already using
and what verbs you hope to see in the near future. To start the list,
we’re already using quite a few of the built in verbs and most of the
social media custom verbs listed here. In the future we’d like to see
verbs for Diigo, sharing items via Google Reader, and more video
related verbs. Let’s hear what’s on your list.

Yesterday Google released its new Chrome browser.
I anxiously downloaded it, tried it, then uninstalled it after 15
minutes. I failed to come across anything that compensated for the lack
of extension support. Firefox has too many extensions I’m simply not
willing to give up. One of these is the previously discussedUbiquity.
add-on for the YubNub command line tool. Last week, Mozilla Labs
released another console extension along similar lines that’s become
indispensible to me:

Once you install the extension, you call up the console window by hitting Ctrl-Space.
What’s especially nice about Ubquity’s interface is that it overlays
the currently displayed web page as a translucent modal window, so
queries can be performed without losing sight of the information that
most likely provoked the lookup. In some cases, though not enough at
the moment, query results are displayed inline — directly in the
console window — instead of switching focus to a new page or tab.

15 commands in action

Ubiquity handles natural language command phrases, so you can
theoretically enter a command the way you intuit it, without having to
learn the formal syntax. Like all putative natural language processing
by computer, your mileage may vary.

Many of the commands can be abbreviated to the minimum number of
letters unique to their targets. While “m” will bring up the MSN search
command as the first selection, you can use “ma” to evoke the map
command directly. To avoid variations that might change as new commands
are added, I’ll stick to either the full commands or abbreviations that
might be further abbreviated.

1. Map.
   If Ubiquity did nothing but look up maps and embed them into an email,
   it would still be worth the installation. Any any message you compose
   in a web-based mail program, you can highlight the term you want to
   search, hit Ctrl-Space, type map, and the results will show
   up inline. Click on the relevant result, hit Space, pan or zoom to
   refine the Google Map displayed, then click on the footer, Insert map
   into page. Voila! Your recepient sees a whole map in your message, not
   a link. I’ve wanted this feature in Google Maps for years.
2. Email. This Gmail-only command allows you to send
   a page, a selection on a page, or a unique message. As with all
   Ubiquity commands, bring up the console by hitting Ctrl-Space.
   If you want to send a link to your current page to a friend, type Email
   to [contact name], where the contact name can be anyone in your Gmail
   contacts, and hit Enter. Ubiquity will even recognize first names, so Email to Fred will work fine.
   

   
   

   If you want to send a snippet of the page to Fred, highlight the selection, call up the console and type Email this to Fred.
   Ubiquity will substitute “this” with your selection. If you want to
   send a new message to Fred, like “Thanks for sending that file!”, type
   Email Thanks for sending that file! to Fred. Unfortunately,
   these messages open in a Gmail compose window in a new page or tab, but
   all you have to do from that point is hit Send.
   

3. Google. You knew this was coming.
   Preceding any term with the letter “g” followed by a space performs a
   search on that term. Like the normal Google search box, you can use
   advanced search operators for queries like “chrome -google”. Typing any
   phrase that’s not preceded by something Ubiquity recognizes as a
   command will run as a Google search by default, so “getting a passport
   to spain” will — you guessed it — do a Google search on that phrase. If
   you highlight a word or phrase on a page, you can enter g this into Ubiquity, and Google will search the highlighted text that replaces “this.”
4. Wiki. Same principle, different service. You can
   search Wikipedia on a highlighted term by entering wiki this, or you
   can do the same with a new entry by hand (”w antonio gaudi”).
5. Add. This “add-to-calendar” command adds a new or highlighted selection to Google
   Calendar. Unlike Gmail, the event gets added in the background, and the
   entry is confirmed in a popup window. To reiterate, Ubiquity accepts
   natural language entries, so “Dinner with Melanie Thursday at 7pm” will
   get slated correctly.
6. Check. Entering check [day or date] into Ubiqity will display your GCal entries inline. Entering check by itself returns today’s calendar.
7. Weather. Entering we [city-state or zip code]
   into Ubiquity will display the current weather inline: the temperature,
   smog condition, wind velocity and humidity. I use this in conjunction
   with the email or twit command to tease my friends outside of California’s perpertually perfect climate.
8. Twit. As much as I love full-featured Twitter clients like TweetDeck, nothing beats the simplicity of hitting Ctrl-Space and typing twit [message] to so_and_so, or sending a selection of text using twit this to so_and_so. At the moment, there’s no way to receive tweets or ping Twitter for new messages.
9. Word count. As a student of copywriting, I’m frequently curious about an article’s word length. Highlighting the desired text and entering word count
   into Ubiquity will give you just that. There used to be a Firefox
   extension that did the same with a context menu, but it seems to have
   disappeared.
10. Translate. You can translate a new entry or selected text. For new entries, type translate [word or phrase] from [language] to [language], and the result is displayed inline. If you translate this to english
    for highlighted text on a page, Ubiquity will actually replace the text
    directly on the page. When it works, it’s amazing, but I’ve had mixed
    results with this command. It’s worth pointing out that Ubiquity is
    currently at version 0.1.1 — an alpha release.
11. Define. Being able to do a dictionary lookup without leaving your current page by typing define [term] or simply highlighting a word, then entering define
    into Ubquity, is a lot less annoying that having to look up the word in
    a new tab. With highlighted words, there’s no need to add “this” to
    define.
12. Highlight. To
    annotate a selection with persistent highlighting, drag the cursor over
    the selection and type highlight into Ubiquity. When you deselect it,
    the text is left with a yellow highlight.
13. Delete. You can actually delete images and text by highlighting (selecting) them and entering delete into Ubiquity.
14. Undo. If you get carried away with highlighting and deleting passages, enter undo.
15. Digg. Feel free to use this one for this article.