i am not a fan of mozilla’s ubiquity.
Mozilla is working on a new product — an application — called Ubiquity. Watch this video to see what it’s all about.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Perhaps it is just me, but this kind of thing makes me angry. It is one step closer not having net neutrality as far as I’m concerned… maybe not officially, but apps like this contribute to the web becoming a smaller place… and not necessarily in a good way. It becomes a smaller place because it sections people more and more off from the web as a whole, and more into confined cubicles of websites that have already been tried and true. As you can see, all of the examples in the site are things like Craigslist, Twitter, Google Maps… with a lot of those things having commands explicitly for those websites alone. The command for Twitter is Twit. It’s not going to be able to be used anywhere else.
As technology develops, it becomes more and more scary, as far as I’m concerned. People want customize everything. Customize how this website looks. Customize what products you see on Amazon. Customize, customize, customize. Sure, customization might be cool for the general public — for people who don’t give an absolute fuck if they’re spoon-fed materials — but for people who ARE interested in finding out new things and ARE interested in making the web a place with legitimate competition, customization and programs like Ubiquity are a bad thing.
Perhaps it is disturbing to me only because I am a part of the web industry and my life revolves around having a chance “as a little guy” when there are hundreds of exisitng web giants competing in the same space… but it’s BAD!!! 