Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs is a Firefox plugin that bridges simple user commands, semantic data embedded in a web page and standard API to make life a lot easier for users. 

Some examples:

• getting a map of craigslist rentals
• dropping restaurant reviews into an email
• forward the translation of a web page to a colleague

Ubiquity is about working with information rather than being a passive recipient.  Building on microformats, semantic markup and natural language processing ubiquity is still in its early stages, but in the long term will become integrated into Firefox.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, 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: * Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.) * 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.) * Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility. * Extend the browser functionality easily.

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

Some new Google Talk features make it much easier for site owners to keep in touch with their visitors. 

You can now embed a “chatback” badge in your site that lets visitors see whether you’re available for a chat session.  A simple wizard lets you choose between different badge formats, including a version that can be sent by email. When clicked, the badge launches a simplified web based Google Talk client.

The full version of the client now features group chat and media embedding.

Tags: GoogleTalk, chatback, chat

It’s always nice to pop the hood and take a look at what drives a favorite web application. In the latest issue of Adobe Edge Julia Campagna reveals some of the technical wizardry behind Sproutbuilder, the free Flash authoring, viral marketing web application.

Adobe Edge: June 2008 via kwout

The Sproutbuilder web application makes it easy to build and distribute interactive Flash widgets like this:

Julia describes the some of the key architecuural components of the application as:

• Flex 3 - to create the rich client interface.
• Drupal, PHP and Apache on the server side.
• Amazon S3 for content delivery.

To get a feel for the powerful simplicity of the application take a look at this demonstration featuring the new Ribbit, Seismic Video, Google Forms and Twitter integration.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: SproutBuilder, Flex, Drupal, Flash, PHP

Blist, the easy to use, web-based “database for the rest of us” is growing some pretty nifty social sharing features.

writepermission.png (PNG Image, 1041×613 pixels) - Scaled (96%) via kwout

Users can now share access to Blists with a permission structure that controls whether the blist is public or private, and who is able to change the data. It’s even possible for several users to edit a shared Blist simultaneously.

todoresults.png (PNG Image, 1041×613 pixels) - Scaled (96%) via kwout

The structure of Blists can also be shared and used as templates when creating new databases. For example, instead of starting from scratch when designing a todo list you can search Blist for other people’s designs and pick the one best suited to your needs.

Google has added a map chart type to its free data visualisation solution. Google charts API creates images on the fly to present data encoded in the image url.

The available maps are at continental or world scale, with the exception of the USA where geographical data for each state can be displayed.

Developer’s Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code via kwout

Data for the charts is included as url parameters using ISO Country Codes, RGB color values and simple numeric or string encoding of data values.

Developer’s Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code via kwout

The URL’s are simple enough to construct by (a careful) hand, but are more suited to scripting and code generation.