Mozilla Lab recently released Ubiquity, it aims to lower the threshold for Web mashup. The following clips demonstrates how Ubiquity works in action:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The 0.1 version is pretty much the prototype, but still quite inspiring. As more and more application have migrated from the desktop to the cloud, some may consider to replicate the OS to WebOS, others try to glue different pieces together to stop reinventing the wheel. Ubiquity takes the second approach, and seems quite promising.

As a die-hard command line user, I really love the simplicity of Ubiquity. And hopefully the following features may emerge later:

• Wrap another command add prologue and epilogue, glue several commands together for a new functionality.
• Pipe or we could do this in-place by using Pipe.
• Drag-n-drop from the Ubiquity to the web page, and vice versa.
• Nohup, fg, bg and screen full job controls for a quick response for BIG jobs, goes too far?

Any idea of new commands that make your life easier?

I once asked my colleague the name of a song, I barely remembered its lyric, though managed to hum the melody, and I am pretty sure it come from his favorite singer, Fish Leong. But neither of us could recall the name of the song. I searched the web, and found Medomi:

Midomi stands out from other music search engines by supporting to search music by humming. The user may use its microphone to upload her humming, then the search engine would return the matched section. A full version purchase link(via iTune) sits besides it for the user’s convenience.

I hummed the song, and the very first return result is exactly what I am looking for. No a big surprise as the song is just released in Leong’s last album, and the artist is quite popular. Then I tried some old songs, more precisely, 1995 by Bob Chen. Nothing relevant returned, it seems the song not even in their database. So I registered, logged in and recorded my own rendition in Midomi studio, the next time I searched it by humming, the search engine returns the expected result.

As we all know, search, index are formalized, the hardest part is how to extract the pattern precisely and concisely. Midomi addresses this problem with an extremely brilliant idea, let the users do it, is there any delicate artificial intelligence algorithm smarter than human being? And the user activities are easily synergized for other web 2.0 ingredients, like friends, groups etc, that is a good news for the venture capitals.

The only missing piece is there is no API for the developers, that make it hard to integrate this web service to your personal music management software, like iTune or Amarok. As the pattern extraction is powered by human, if you happen to be in the tip of the long tail, just pray the singer get talented.