Ubiquity, a new Firefox add-on, combines the high-speed access to and manipulation of information of Quicksilver with the user-friendly language interpretation of the Assist button, bolting both onto the browser. Ultimately, it has the potential to be something close to a command line interface for the web.

With the add-on installed, all you have to do is press the command key combination - Alt+Space by default on the Mac - and start typing a command. There are lots of simple ones. Type wikipedia¹ followed by a search term, hit enter, and you’re transported to the relevant results. Type email Don't forget our lunch on Tuesday! to Steve, hit enter, and you’ll be taken to Gmail, with your message all ready to send.

Ubiquity gets really clever when you want to combine its features. What if Steve hasn’t been to the restaurant you’re meeting at? Before sending the mail Ubiquity helped you to create, invoke it again, and type map Stravaign. Yep, a Google Map centred on the best Glasgow pub will appear, along with a link to insert it directly into your mail message.

Like Quicksilver, Ubiquity is a wee bit fiddly to explain, and doesn’t sound quite as thrilling as it does when seen in action. So here’s a video walk-through (skip forward forty-five seconds if you want to avoid the hip marketing-speak intro):

Sure, developer Aza Raskin is showing Ubiquity in the best possible light. In real life, it’s pretty buggy - fair enough, since it’s a prototype. It’s very limited in scope, too - if you don’t use Google’s calendar and mail applications, the best features won’t be much use. And it won’t do some of the things you might expect it to, like lifting microformatted information from web pages and dumping them into your address book or calendar. But it has huge potential to turn disparate web services, which, until now, we’ve had to wrangle together ourselve with unwieldy cutting and pasting, into one great big useful thing.

Also, in the wake of the recent fawning over Aurora - a vision of the coming web in which useful combinations of services were buried under needlessly jazzy 3-D interfaces controlled by daft futuristic peripherals - and similar mock-ups, it’s good to see a project which offers some of the basic utilities imagined by the futurologists on the Aurora team, right now, using a simple, clear interface that takes advantage of one skill all web users share: the ability to type words in a language they understand.

More info:

• Introducing Ubiquity
• Ubiquity 0.1 User Tutorial
• Ubiquity In Depth
• Ubiquity cracks open personal mashup tinkering *Writing a Delicious command for Ubiquity

Thanks to Neil and Matt for pointing me in Ubiquity’s direction!

1. Or just wi. Ubiquity is clever enough to work out what you’re after, or will present a list of possible commands to choose from. It will also work out that, if you’ve selected some text on a web page, that’s what you want to search for.↩

Hammersly is reporting on the run up to Turkey’s general election in July for the BBC, but rather than just filing copy for the web, audio for the World Service and video for News 24, he’s using a raft of web services to augment the more traditional media.

There are Flickr photographs, links on del.icio.us, status updates on Twitter, routes on Google Maps and, of course, a weblog. You can even add Hammersly as a friend on Facebook.

It’s an interesting experiment in newsgathering and alternative modes of broadcasting, but what’s really grabbed me is that Hammersly is not only providing new ways to follow a news story, but also revealing the processes which usually remain hidden from viewers or listeners, the nuts and bolts of producing a news item:

I probably shouldn’t talk about it in any detail yet, but by the looks of things I’ll soon be involved in a new web project that could learn a lot from the Turkish Journey experiment when it comes to arts reporting and reviewing, rather than news. More on that next month.

Last week MyOpenID added a pair of new features to combat ‘phishing’. That’s the trick familiar from those shady emails purporting to be from your bank which ask you to ‘confirm your account details’ on a site that looks just like your usual login page. OpenID is particularly vulnerable to phishing, since it works by taking you away from the site you’re on in order to sign in, which means that folk will get used to quickly entering their details and clicking the ‘Allow’ button without paying close attention to the URL in the address bar.

Now Simon Willison has launched a new service called idproxy.net, which lets you set up an OpenID identity based on your existing Yahoo! account and also includes a fairly strong layer of features to guard against phishermen, on top of Yahoo!’s existing protection.

Nice work. The usefulness of OpenID from a user’s point of view rests on the fact that it potentially frees you from the hassles of mainting squillions¹ of accounts for all the different sites you use, but achieves this by… asking you to set up yet another bloody account.

Sorry to keep banging on about this—I’m just rather taken with the speed at which folk involved with OpenID seem to go from raising concerns to suggesting solutions and implementing them.

1. I just checked in the application I use to store my passwords, and I have 87 different accounts on the web. Skimming the list, I reckon about two thirds of these could safely be replaced by my OpenID.↩

Hyundai logo

Daniel Libeskind’s Gazprom building

That doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but it has the potential to change the way we all use websites, particularly those that require you to login, or prove in some way that you are who you say you are.

At the moment, maintaining an identity on all the websites you visit is tricky—at each one, you have to go to all the bother of signing up, cross your fingers that someone hasn’t taken your preferred username, and think up a memorable-but-secure password—with OpenID, you maintain a single identity, expressed in the form of a URL, and can use it to log in to any OpenID-enable site you come across. In other words, OpenID turns the concept of having an account at a given website on its head, letting users be themselves all over the web. One URL, one password: simple.

As well as working as a web-wide login, OpenID also makes it possible for people to keep information about themselves in one place, instead of scattered across personal websites, social networking profiles, MySpace pages and all the rest. And if your information changes, it can be changed once, in one place, and the change is instantly reflected across every site where you’ve logged in using OpenID.

If you have a domain of your own, and are happy to do a bit of tinkering you can make that your OpenID identity¹; if you don’t, you can sign up with a number of free services, like MyOpenID (here’s mine).

At the moment, only a limited number of sites are using OpenID—mostly wikis and weblogs—but, with millions of LiveJournal folk able to use their journal URL as an OpenID identity, and popular sites like Zooomr, Ma.gnolia and Technorati adding support every day, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a commonplace, if not standard, way of managing an identity online.

With all that in mind, I’ve added OpenID support to Submit Response—if you have an identity, you can sign your comments here with it, and everyone will know for sure that you are you.

1. I actually find this faintly disturbing—in a sense, now I am submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/. (I plan to change this to the currently unused jackmottram.com soon).↩