Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
At this launch stage, the Ubiquity
prototype "is meant as a illustration of a concept and mainly focuses on the
platform. The next release will explore interfaces that are closer to features
that might make it into Firefox."
You can read about Ubiquity in depth
here. It describes the problem as being that the Web is disconnected,
forcing you to go through multiple separate serial, non-integrated processes to
accomplish tasks.
The Ubiquity team's goal is nothing less than "universal access" (a lofty
goal indeed). "Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the
browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do."
They say:
We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of
structured natural language commands. You can select something and
Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both
cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it”
refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my
web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to
understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near
SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where
you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you
insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that
you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.
It's good to see that the team has no false modesty, admitting for example:
"There’s a long way to go with this interface, though. We aren’t even
prioritizing the command suggestions we give. The interface looks messy and is
visually cluttered. We have made the ultimate faux pas of putting hyphens into
what should be natural language commands. It’s hard to know what you can and can’t type."
And going on:
We found it difficult and time-consuming to write extensions
to Firefox. There is something largely last-decade about
requiring restarts to add a new feature to your browsing
experience. It’s ironic that the entire Web is on a push model,
yet the browser—the most fundamental tool of interacting with
the Web—is on a pull model.
The fundamental problem is that extending the browser, and
hence the web, is too difficult. The closer new browser
functionality can be packaged to look like standard HTML and JS,
the larger and more diverse a community will create it. The
desktop paradigm for extension development, while powerful, has
a high cost of adoption. Right now we have a short tail of
browser functionality with thousands of add-ons. There should be
millions. We can get to that long tail using a more web-like
model for functionality development — tools that are accessible
to hobbyists and tinkerers, but that scales to professionals.
This is rather heady stuff for those of us mere mortals who aren't into this
sort of development, but nonetheless it's indicative of how dedicated
people keep seeking out ways to deliver tools that resolve some of these issues.
David Bass
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