I twittered yesterday about the coolness factor of Ubiquity, Mozilla Labs’ newest product. What that short statement belies is what’s more important though: how it manages to capture the what’s really coming out as the need of the everyday, regular computer user from the web applications they use, and from the internet in general.

Basically, Ubiquity is a mashup service for the masses. If you didn’t understand that then it makes Ubiquity even more for you. With the plugin, you take what you need from one service by the use of plain-English-like commands, like “email jhun-jhun”, and embed information into it from another service through other commands like “map the corner of quezon and west ave” or “tinyurl mrkabab.com”, and the thing does it for you without hassle (aside from the prerequisite name/password check). The idea is that you can access whatever content you need from wherever without having to click and click and click, then put all the information you got together so it makes sense to you and the people you’re sending it to.

Now that’s always been the underlying principle of the internet itself, but I guess even with the coming of the mashup sites, no one really thought about making the process more fluid because they’ve worked well enough before. Until now, that is. I’ve seen how much better it could be, and frankly I’m finding it hard to switch back to the old way, because some things are just done faster with the command line, especially when you know what you’re doing.

A short demo of what I’m talking about, straight from the devs themselves:

Ubiquity clicks with me because of many things. One is that it’s a totally new way of doing something really old; that is, Googling for something and then proceeding to copy-paste it. We’ve all done that, and while it’s fast, something can be done to make it faster and more seamless. Two, it keeps out of your way. If you need it, it’s just a quick CTRL + Space key combo, and another Esc from going away. From what I’ve tested of it, it doesn’t come in conflict with existing key combinations also. Three, it’s what Google Chrome‘s Omnibar tries to accomplish – a plethora of functions compacted into just one single text area.

Of course, there’s a couple of stuff I want to include, but basically it’s pretty much within the realm of the web applications themselves. Like, I’d rather have a couple more options with regards to the services included, but as Ubiquity is built on the foundation of open Web APIs, it’s up to the developers of the different web apps to make their code engines available. With a little pressure from Mozilla, of course.

In the meantime, I’ll be emailing people at the speed of my fingertips, and not my mouse.