In the wonderful world of web2.0 (or in this case 3.0 is the buzzword of choice) most product names are completely stupid, and usually involve dropping a vowel. But today Mozilla (the people behind Firefox) announced Ubiquity. What’s great is it does exactly what it’s name says.
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.
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.
While this might seem ultra geeky, what it does show is how the web is developing and how people actually want to use the pipes. It’s not just about people visiting your site anymore, it’s giving them the tools to do whatever they want, wherever they want. Something that should be a part of any digital idea we do.
Scorched.tv is a new ’social media television series’ being produced by Channel 9. It’s a story based in 2012, when Australia has run out of water and evidently a great disaster is looming. The site features video bits, character blogs, and the climax of the whole thing is a 90-minute show on Channel 9 later in the year.
Sounds like a moderately good idea, however the only problem I can see is that there’s nothing social about it. The few comments on the characters blogs are just confused people, and the way users submit content is by emailing their ideas to the writers. Oh and there’s no rss feeds for new videos, but you can subscribe by email.
So it misses the mark in the social sense, but it’s a good first time effort, generating mostly positive talk.
We get so used to the conventional ways in which sites are constructed that we get caught up in what is expected sometimes. Â But every now and again someone comes along and creates something different, something that uses the medium in the way it should be used.
girleffect.org is a great example of how a charity site could look. Like all charity sites they need to convey their story in an emotional and compelling manner, most fail at this first hurdle but girleffect.org manages to captivate the viewer from the very start.
It is also a good example of how a site can be made to be distributed and shared
Nike are behind the initiative which just shows that every sector can learn from the big consumer brands experiences with digital; it tend to be those brands that are at the cutting edge.
