Mozilla on Tuesday released a public prototype of Ubiquity, a curious command-based interface to locating information on the Web and creating compilations of information from various sources. See: Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all.
At the moment, it's most capable as a command-line browser. You press the hot key, ctrl-space, and you can just start typing lookup commands, like "imdb Blade Runner." Or, if text is already selected in the browser, your command will act on them. Mouse over a restaurant page in Yahoo Mail, press the hotkey, and type "yelp" for a review, for example.
Ubiquity can find and insert map images into e-mails.
But the most interesting application is Ubiquity's capability to extract items from Web pages and insert them in whatever you're creating, like an e-mail message or a blog post. At the moment I believe the only site you can extract data from is Google Maps, but clearly Mozilla's direction is to build a platform that takes bits of data from Web resources and pastes it together on the user's behalf.
Microsoft, too, is putting resources into a new feature that parcels out Web pages. In the upcoming Internet Explorer 8, the browser supports a feature Microsoft calls, "Web Slices," which is the platform's capability to take a portion of a Web page--like a stock chart on a financial page--and display it as a pop-up widget that's called from the bookmark bar in the browser.
Slices on Internet Explorer are part RSS feed, part widget.
Slices are built using a combination of protocols, including Microformats, RSS, and new HTML tags that IE uses to demark Slices.
Together, Ubiquity and Web Slices lead me to believe we're entering an era of fracturing Web content. Already we have seen content separated from presentation with RSS, and we've given developers access to online data for their mashups via Web APIs. But the growth of Microformat-coded Web pages will make it possible for users to more easily create their own mashups--personal profile pages that have just the pieces of Web content they want, or e-mail messages made up of live maps, automatically updating weather forecasts, up-to-the-minute travel information, and so on.
It means that developers will have to learn how to code pages for modularity. Conceptually that's not that big a deal, although if coding for Ubiquity and coding for Slices is different, it's going to be a technical mess. What I am waiting to see is how managers wrestle with the branding and revenue implications of letting their sites be mashed up and refactored into tiny pieces all over the Web, by anyone. I predict that the sites that give away the most data will reap the biggest benefits, but that will be a difficult leap of faith for many publishers.
See also: ActiveWords.
At the SMX West conference today, Yahoo is making a big deal of its new open search initiative. This program, not yet live, will allow site publishers to influence the way the Yahoo search engine displays results for their sites.
The idea is to get structured data into search results. For example, if you search for product, and one of the results is a CNET review, open search will know that CNET reviews contain numerical ratings and will display that number in an easy-to-read format. Other data that could make it into search results include addresses, phone numbers, photos, related stories, or basically anything the publisher wants to display to people who see their results on Yahoo search.
This is no ordinary search hit.
The service does not, however, let publishers change the ranking of search results themselves.
It's a great idea. Search engines do not do a universally good job of parsing search, and this initiative lets publishers regain some control over how their content is presented without allowing them to actually muck with search result ordering.
On the other hand, considering the "open" moniker Yahoo has put on the project, the company is being extremely cagey with the details of how it will actually work. I talked with Amit Kumar, Yahoo Search director of product management, who said that there is as of yet no open spec published for site managers to write to. Nor would he say if Yahoo will support Microformats for this platform--although the company has been using this open standard in some experiments (Yahoo Local, Yahoo Tech and Yahoo Movies UK).
Also, it's not totally clear how users will get exposed to the "open"-powered results for all but the largest of sites. Big sites like Yelp and The New York Times will be blessed by Yahoo from the get-go, and users will see structured results instead of the straight text they do now, when the product launches. But newer and smaller sites will see their search results displayed in the old-fashioned way until either users vote the structured results into rotation or Yahoo manually approves their formats.
There's more at play here than simply better search results (although that's no small deal). As Google tried to do with Google Base, getting site publishers to submit structured data to a search engine gives the engines enormous new ammunition they can use to consolidate data, create new mashups of it, and display ever-more-targeted advertising. Publishers really can't say no to this feature, since it will improve the display of their search results, but there may be a cost in the long run: why will Web users need to visit a site's home page if a search site like Yahoo is able to parse and display its key content itself?
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