Find Second Life profiles easily with Ubiquity

I’m such a geek :-)

Early this morning, as I do pretty much every morning, I was sitting here with the day’s first cup of coffee and reading over my RSS feeds, and found an intriguing article on Ajaxian about a new Firefox plugin from Mozilla.

Ubiquity is a Firefox plugin that adds a very slick text-based UI for running a wide variety of powerful and useful ‘commands’ :

Enter Ubiquity

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.

That last part, the part about extending browser functionality, is of course my favorite part.  There’s a much lower barrier to entry for creating custom Ubiquity commands than there is to creating Firefox add-ins, and with the live ‘on the fly’ capability of the built-in editor I was able to create a custom Ubiquity command for searching Second Life profiles.  This is something I do quite commonly, often several times a day, when I get offline messages from Second Life users with questions or feedback about one of my swords, and previously I had to use a Bookmark and open a separate page to find someone.

Now, I can just do this :

So, okay…  Not Earth-shattering, but I am well pleased with the amount of functionality I got with about 45 minutes worth of work, and it will definitely smooth my customer service workflow.

Here’s the Mozilla overview video on Ubiquity, which should give you a much better general overview of what it is and what it can do:


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

All in all, I’m very excited about Ubiquity, and am now considering creating commands to look up C:SI scores and other data (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?).

P.S.: If you are interested in the sl-who command I developed, you can get the code here, or simply visit this blog again with Firefox after Ubiquity is installed and choose to subscribe to the command when prompted.

This entry was written by Takuan and posted on 2008/08/27 at 11:31 am and filed under Cool Tech, off topic, Software Development. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

6 Comments

  1. Takuan
    Posted 2008/08/27 at 11:47 am | Permalink

    Wow, that video of mine really blows, doesn’t it?

    If you want to download a (somewhat) clearer video, you can grab it here.

    Either way, you’ll still be missing out on just how cool an experience Ubiquity can be until you try it.

  2. Colin Kiernan
    Posted 2008/08/27 at 12:52 pm | Permalink

    Yeah, Ubiquity is awesome. In the blog entry about it on the Mozilla Labs blog, I also came across a link to Enso which is basically the same idea, but for Windows.

    Have you seen Aurora?

  3. Colin Kiernan
    Posted 2008/08/27 at 12:58 pm | Permalink

    btw, what skin are you using in that video?

  4. Takuan
    Posted 2008/08/27 at 1:14 pm | Permalink

    Enso looks pretty cool! I will definitely check it out. I didn’t realize there was something like that for Windows.

    The Firefox theme is Nasa Night Launch. I’m a space/astronomy fan, and wanted a dark theme, so it fit pretty much perfectly for me, haha.

  5. Takuan
    Posted 2008/08/27 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

    Oh, and yes, I’ve seen Aurora. Adaptive Path is one of my RSS subscriptions, and I’ve followed the Aurora posts with some interest.

    It’s going to be a very bright future, methinks.

  6. Takuan
    Posted 2008/08/27 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

    Wouldn’t you know it… I post about this nifty new thing I created, and Second Life gets borked right afterward?

    I swear… Second Life instability is going to drive me bonkers:

    Warning: mysql_connect(): User linden already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 190 Warning: mysql_select_db(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 191 Warning: mysql_real_escape_string(): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2) in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 194 Warning: mysql_real_escape_string(): A link to the server could not be established in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 194 Warning: mysql_db_query(): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2) in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 226 Warning: mysql_db_query(): A link to the server could not be established in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 226 Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 228 Warning: mysql_close(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /local/www/search.secondlife.com/public/common.php on line 248

    It’s not Ubiquity or the command I made causing the problem, it’s Second Life :)