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So, yesterday I told you about this new Firefox add-on called Ubiquity. The promo material made it sound really cool, and if you’re a total propeller head (I’m halfa one and why I got excited), then I suppose it is.

Problem 1: You have to type commands into Ubiquity to tell it what you want.

The commands are easy enough, but there are so many, how can you remember them all? You’ll need a cheat sheet or have to keep referring back to them online whenever you want to use it. ‘Course you’ll surely come to remember the ones you use a lot, but who has time for memorization? Sheesh. I mean, there are so many more important things to remember and your brain can only hold so much. Stuff keeps leaking out of mine at the most embarrassing times, you know?

Problem 2: Now that I see how it works, I realize that I already have most of those abilities in Firefox already. I mean, I can search Amazon, IMDB, eBay, Wikipedia, etc. from my search bar because I set it up to do that. No gain there. I can’t insert a map easily into email, but oh, well… How often do I want to do that, anyway? I can see the usefulness if you’re using a cell phone and you want someone to meet you at a place they never heard of, but here’s the other part… those maps are often unreliable. The can totally take you in directions you never wanted to go! Grr.

Problem 3: It doesn’t integrate with my most favorite add-on (or vice versa), which is Fast Dial. I love having the ability to get to like 15 of my favorite sites (you can add as many as you want, really) with one click. I get thumbnails of each site on my homepage and BOOM! I don’t have to look up a bookmark and click on it, the site is right there in my face. Love it.

So, I had to shut Ubiquity down.

Here are some suggestions for the developers, and I know they worked really hard on this, but…

The app isn’t user friendly at all. No icons to click. You have to type fer cryin’ out loud. That’s so 90’s! So, I’d make it easeir to use for the less techy of us and the lazy, like me.

And I’d make it app friendly. Ubiquity should seemlessly integrate with all the other add-ons, no matter how squirrely they are. Ha. I know that’s totally impossible because there will always be conflicts among them, but it’s a dream.

The concept of Ubiquity is cool. The application is just so-so.

But, it’s only Beta. They’re still working on it, trying to make it better. From all the things that Mozilla puts out, I know they will. You guys still rock.

Popularity: 17% [?]

So, the social milieu is ever morphing, and one of the very old standards is changing in a big way.

Social bookmarking practically started with Del.icio.us, but what a handle! I always thought it was suicidal in terms of marketing, but people found it and use the social bookmarking service all the time. I guess I learned about it in 2005 from Tim Linden, my old friend at StartXchange.

I thought it was kind of cool then, but didn’t have any idea how HUGE this stuff would get.

Anyway, Delicious is now Delicious.com–easier to deal with when typing the URL into the address bar. Easier to find for anyone who didn’t know the old .us domain.

And it looks a bit different. Still that nice four color square logo, but inside, Delicious is totally revamped and looking sweet.

You can check out bookmarks or tags on the front page, which is pretty cool.  But it also lets you subscribe to tags.

To check it out, I subscribed to the tag “internet marketing,” and got a bunch of interesting stuff back.

In fact, I learned that Mozilla just came out with Ubiquity, which will allow you to, and I quote from the Mozilla Labs blog:

“Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.”

That’s pretty cool, no? I mean, I’m going to check that out. But if it weren’t for Delicious, I may not have found that intersting tidbit of information.

Web 2.0 rocks, and Delicious is a total cornerstone of it.

Wow! Imagine if they’d had this when I was researching stuff all the time. I go way back to pre-Internet days as a writer, and I can assure you that going to the library or running across town to interview the local expert wasn’t cutting it. Now, all the information in the world is right at your finger tips.

I feel blessed.  Going to add Ubiquity now.

Popularity: 19% [?]

So, I’ve been using Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 for a couple of days and I really like the look and feel of it. It’s more 2008 and has some cool features.

For example, when you type a URL into the address bar, it drops a menu down that makes seeing what you’ve typed in before pretty easy. You see the site’s name, the URL and the favicon. I’m easily amused, you know.

Another cool feature is the “back” button. It’s all gelled out and looking calm, like. You know, it’s like gellin’. And there’s a new icon for “Most Visited” sites. That makes it easy to get to the sites you’ve just been to more than few times.

But even better is an add-on called “Speed Dial,” which works with 3.0. I love it. Shows me all the sites I program into it that I have to look up all the time, which now, I don’t because I have Speed Dial. Nifty.

Here are things I hate about 3.0, OK, Mozilla?:

Some of my add-ons won’t work anymore. Grr. This is unpleasant in many respects. I’ve also lost ColorZilla, which helps me to get the HTML and CSS color codes when I’m trying to match something. Grr..

AND, Tab Mix won’t work. Every time I click a URL, it opens in my current window. That makes me nuts! I changed the setting in Options, but it doesn’t seem to be the option I need. Grr… Do you know how exasperating it is to be in the midst of a streaming .mp3 because you’re trying to fill in a transcript blank and you get sent to another site in that tab, against your will! Well…

You have to frickin’ start all over again! You have to fast forward that puppy and hope to God you land in the general area where you were before. I mean, people send you IMs and tell you to go to other sites during the day. It’s not even me goofing off! CRipes.

OK… So now that I’ve ranted about that…

I have no other rants, really. I like Firefox 3.0 so far, especially the Twitter plugin. It’s easy to see whenever someone I’m following tweets, and I can tweet from there, too. Pretty cool.

I haven’t read all the tech stuff that probably tells you to stay away from Firefox 3.0, but I just saw that Paul Colligan likes it.

So do I, Paul. So do I.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Over at Shoemoney’s blog today, he posted his favorite Firefox extensions. You can check them out here:

http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/03/10/11-must-have-firefox-extensions/

I have to agree with him on most of them. But I have a list of my own:

Fasterfox: Makes firefox run just a little faster

Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer: This is great, if you’re going from desktop to laptop and vice versa.

IE Tab: Very cool for developers. You can see things in both browsers, which we sometimes forget to check and then our pages look wanky in one browser or the other. (Usually not Firefox, but the Other)

SEOQuake: Allows you to see what’s what with any web page, including the three big search engines’ pages indexed, backlinks, page rank, Whois, Age, Alexa, and a bunch of stuff.

Tab Mix Plus: Lets you move your tabs around and all kind of stuff you can’t do without it.

Having all these awesome extensions makes Firefox the best browser on the planet.

Anyway, you can search for them all at: https://addons.mozilla.org

Popularity: 37% [?]