Interview with Aza Raskin, Part 2: Making Ubiquity ubiquitous

AZA RASKIN, user experience chief, Mozilla Labs: We'll release when we're ready.

SCOTT FULTON: You've told me already in this discussion that Mozilla is an organization that's more committed to top-line functionality than bottom-line profit. So are people going to look at Ubiquity and have to tell themselves, "Well, it's nice that they're working on this, but I'm just going to have to be patient as far as results are concerned?"

AZA RASKIN: Again, I think there is a model of graceful upgrading. I don't think we're going to see Ubiquity as it stands now in Firefox for a little while yet. I think we're going to start to see the explorations people are doing here inform what goes into the Awesome Bar very soon.

And I should note that, unlike research projects, Ubiquity at 0.1 launch is actually out there in the world, being used by -- at the moment -- tens of thousands of people. So it is real, these people are out there using it. It's not as pie-in-the-sky as, say, Semantic WebSCOTT FULTON: Right now, I've noticed when Ubiquity 0.1 is given a phrase that it cannot parse, it hasn't seen this command before, by default, it throws the phrase over to Google and lets Google handle it. What if -- this is an opportunity here -- instead of throwing it over to Google, Mozilla Labs considered a kind of cloud computing project, if you will, where a service that it hosts is in charge of doing sophisticated lexical parsing, on behalf of all those users of Ubiquity plug-ins, so that the sophistication of the lexical engineering does not have to be hard-wired into everybody's browser, and it does not have to be upgraded in point releases every couple of weeks or month or so? And it can be maintained and expanded on the fly, at home at Mozilla on an hourly basis. Perhaps this is a cloud computing solution waiting in the wings.

AZA RASKIN: You just blow me away with your perscipacity. That's exactly right. Being the browser, you have a lot of...data at your disposal. Of course...being Mozilla, you have to be very careful about privacy. But another way of tackling the problems of natural language is to say, we're not going to take the smart approach; we're going to take the brute force approach, the Google approach, for a spell check or a translate -- although I think those started as research projects outside of Google, at universities. Instead, we can say, we've detected that people type in this, and then they try to do this thing, so then we just connect the dots. It becomes a really great way of doing localization, because there's no new learning or algorithm that you have to do across different languages, because you're just using statistics.

I think that's not something we might do immediately, but something I think is really an interesting area to explore.

And [there's also] Weave...the Mozilla platform for services, started out as just data synchronization and [has become] a full, privacy-aware method of doing delegated access to data. I think that's where that's going to go as well. You want to come help us make it?

That's the direction we're going to have to take in the end, or at least that's the direction the Web is going to take.

SCOTT FULTON: What kind of an optimum service can something like a BetaNews FileForum, to use an example, provide to people who want to experiment with Ubiquity and its commands?

AZA RASKIN: ...There are hundreds of millions of other people out there browsing the Web, millions of them are content creators. How can that help your browsing experience? Ubiquity is about empowering people to extend the Web.

To give an example, one of the things Ubiquity can do right now -- though we haven't really talked it up much -- is, you can port a number of extensions that are currently standard Firefox extensions, into Ubiquity. So it'll do things on page loads, and a couple of people in the community have already done this. So what's interesting there is that it goes from pages and pages and pages of boilerplate code, to something which is around a page of code, including comments. That's a powerful change to have made to going from [requiring] a lot of specialized knowledge to extend the Web, to, all we have to do is know a little bit of JavaScript and a little bit of HTML to extend the Web.

What's doubly cool is, we're trying to figure out how to change the model of actually enhancing the browser. It's a little bit ironic that the browser is a desktop app. It's on the pull model, not the push model. We should be learning something from the Web. Our functionality should be streamable, so there's an experiment in Ubiquity which makes the ability to subscribe to functionality possible. You can sort of imagine it to be "bookmarking" functionality. So you could certainly see that BetaNews could provide a Ubiquity command that somehow adds new functionality, either by typing or by enhancing every page you go to. Just put it up on the page; someone without Ubiquity will never see it, it's just a little <link rel> tab, but somebody with Ubiquity, their experience will be enhanced that much.

You could certainly imagine somebody like ESPN wanting to do something in Ubiquity, by writing probably only 15 lines of code -- the Twitter command is 50 lines, the TinyURL command is eight lines of code -- which puts baseball player stats on baseball players' names that it sees all across the Web. That way, you go to the ESPN site, it suggests, "Hey, I've got this little bit of functionality," and all of a sudden your entire Web browsing experience has been upgraded. Having people outside of Mozilla anywhere on the Web, innovation from the edges, being able to upgrade the Web overnight, is the story and I think it's really compelling.

SCOTT FULTON: How are you able, then, to market the concept? Once this thing has gelled more, how do you then take this message to the general Joe-user out there? The phrase you used with me is, "With only a few lines of JavaScript."

AZA RASKIN: That's for Web developers. One of the big goals of Ubiquity is to take the idea of mashups and move it from the hands of developers and into the hands of users...You can go onto Craigslist, select some houses, say, "Map These," and it dumps them on a map. That's not how Craigslist provided that information; it's how you want to see that information. Ubiquity takes the idea of mashup and moves it from site-centric -- you have to go to HousingMaps.com to see a mashup -- [to user-centric, where] you just select some data and say, "Show it to me the way I want to see it." Select some data on Twitter and say, "Plot this for me." That requires no coding; that just requires a little bit of asking. And that's the difference.

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