I may lose my “early adopter badge” for saying this, but I do not see how Ubiquity really helps anyone. Given that it is a 0.1 release, I know it is far from complete. However, it seems like there is a lot of development required to really make the browser a platform, and make it easier for people to use the Internet as a service. When I say a lot, I mean a minimum of two years until early adopters can praise it like they have praised services like Twitter or FriendFeed. For the rest of the mainstream, we are looking at closer to five years given the traditional adopter cycle.

Of course, the logical question is why do I feel this way? First, look at the examples from the user tutorial. Being able to type “email to Mike” so that GMail creates an email and sends it is not a huge advancement. The search examples are much of the same thing. You can type “wikipedia babel fish” and it will search Wikipedia for you. Obviously, this barely saves any time or mouse clicks. All of the examples are this simplistic, and this adds to my “shouldn’t there be more” feeling.

I am generally underwhelmed for a few different reasons. First, why make the browser the platform? Isn’t it easier to create a website that does all of the same things? Isn’t this what sites like iGoogle or any other personalized homepage with widgets are trying to do? Does this just mean we need better websites?The big question I have with this is “What are we trying to do?” My understanding of the “browser as a platform” concept is that we are trying to treat the Internet as a service or a data source. You can do interesting things when not constrained to a specific page. I think Ubiquity is meant to change the way we work, and that is what I want. The problem is that we are not there yet, and it takes a little imagination to get there.

“Summon Ubiquity” is used throughout the documentation. Why? The services should just be active and ready from a toolbar or even parsed in the address bar. The commands also need to be very generic. If I am searching for information, let me type “find babel fish.” The built-in services can search Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and whatever other search services that support Ubiquity. The process should be meta-everything. If I need a definition, I can type “define ubiquitous” and the service would look for definitions on various reference sites like Dictionary.com and any other engines that support definitions. Another area that could benefit greatly from integration with Ubiquity is semantics and linked data. Both would provide plenty of context and data sources for some interesting applications.

There are a few features that I really like about the service as well. They have included a concept of context or “this.” If I have selected a large section of text on a Web page, I can enter “email this to Mike” and the selected text gets emailed to my contact named Mike. Context in any activity is extremely important, and creating a quick way to get the context is fantastic. The other extremely important feature is that new commands can be created with just some lines of JavaScript. This means that there is not a huge learning curve for the API, it is just a matter of linking together the right API calls. The fact that you do not need to restart Firefox while developing is a nice bonus as well.

Overall, it is fairly obvious that Ubiquity is an interesting technology, but it is still very immature. It is something we should keep an eye on in terms of the platform development as well as what commands and applications developers create on top of the platform.

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The BBC announced today that it would start offering its TV shows on its iPlayer service for longer than the seven days it originally offered them.  According to the organization, its “series stacking” initiative is one that should see more people watch its shows.

Prior to this announcement, BBC only allowed shows to air for seven days before it took them down.  But after realizing that most customers didn’t approve of such a policy, it reversed its stance and said that videos would be left on the site ‘indefinitely’ to allow users to catch up to their favorite shows.

Perhaps more importantly, the BBC announcement also included a point that would see the entire season of shows be made available and not just a select number.  According to the BBC, that more than anything this should see customers find more reason to use iPlayer.

But the BBC announcement runs in direct contrast to what’s currently offered on services like Hulu or Fancast, which only offer a select number of episodes from shows for a finite amount of time.

The BBC’s decision to do this runs directly against the services currently being offered on Hulu.  For its part, Hulu offers shows like The Office for a limited amount of time and only does so at about four to six episodes at a time.  That said, shows are made available (usually) right after they’re aired live.

Regardless, it creates an important dynamic in the space and could put the onus on US sites to do the same sort of thing.  After all, don’t users want to have constant access to as many shows as possible?

The BBC has made the right move in this regard.  It has finally realized that allowing people to watch shows and do what they want with available videos is the key to its success on the iPlayer.  And if it proves to be a success — and it probably will — look for Hulu and others to follow suit.

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Source:Mashable!

Jackie Peters is CVO and Founding Partner of Heavybag Media

I am pretty heavily involved in the expanding startup community here in LA and make my way up to the Bay area on a regular basis. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and see new startups every day. Many of these companies and the entrepreneurs who found them are deeply ensnared in the echo chamber, they’re all drinking each other’s Kool-Aid. We’re talking about people who are not just at the top of the technographic ladder, they’ve gotten to the roof and are looking down on everyone else like they are a bunch of ants.

We forget that there is a whole world out there. Most people have never even heard of Twitter, Brightkite or many of the other services that we have become accustomed to using. It’s a given that eventually these sorts of tools will be adopted by a larger audience, but only when they add real value and only if we present them in a way in which the barriers to entry are minimal.

I believe that if an idea is ever going to make it out of the echo chamber and appeal to a mass market, a company needs to be mindful of the market it’s hoping to serve from the get-go. It’s not enough to have amazing technology. In the end, very few of these companies are technology companies; they are simply built on technology. These companies typically begin with an initial vision that the founder(s)/ CEO use as their road map for success. Having an amazing vision is a requirement for sure, and it’s a great starting point. But rarely is the original vision the best outcome.

The initial vision is basically just one person’s idea of what they think will be cool, successful and profitable. Ultimately, it’s up to the market to determine what meets their criteria. The CEOs that I have admired the most are the ones who use that initial vision as a launch pad, and then listen to their market and iterate on their product, their brand and their marketing strategy to align themselves with their audience.

Photo Credit: 4pizon

It breaks my heart to see so many startups with amazing technology, brilliant minds, and visionary leadership fail due to the fact that they never bothered thinking about the market their product is designed to serve, or worse, they never saw the bigger picture of how their technology could be applied to better serve a larger, or more profitable market.

Good example: Private Beta strategies. It’s typical for most Web-based startups to implement a private Beta strategy, they invite people in who, in exchange for having a sneak peak, will find the bugs in the site, offer their feedback on the experience overall, and in some cases blog about the product or otherwise leverage their social graph to spread some buzz on behalf of the new product. It’s a sound strategy in many ways. Here’s the problem: the typical private Beta invitation list is primarily key influencers within the echo chamber. Is this minute portion of the population really the target audience for most of these companies? If they are, then how do these companies ever plan on monetizing?

An entrepreneur came to me recently with a new online product. It took fantasy football, a very middle-America sort of activity and added components which socialized the process and made it more interesting and captivating for the user. He was concerned that his product might not appeal to his audience and asked me for my advice. He had been describing it to some of his non-tech friends as being like “the Digg of fantasy football.” To which his friends responded, “What’s Digg?” You see, we forget the rest of the country isn’t up here on the roof with us. My advice to him was to explain the product from the point-of-view of the market it was designed to serve. Don’t worry about middle-America grasping on to social media.

Social media in another year or two will be non-existent, it will just be the Web, same as it’s always been, just the next evolution. We don’t need to confuse the masses by getting over their heads with all of the technological mumbo jumbo. We just need to integrate the functionality into our products and services and make sure that there’s a good enough reason for doing so - that it adds value and fulfills the needs and desires of a market, the rest will fall into place. So rather than focusing on the technology, why not focus on how the product makes the user’s experience better.

And what about the marketing strategies these companies employ to let the world know about their product? It’s understandable that a company that’s based on technology would want some presence within the tech world. In the fund raising process it’s essential to be visible and generate buzz within the community so that the investors know you’re there. But beyond that, these companies need to look at themselves and decide: Are we really a technology company? In most cases the answer is no. The answer might be: “We are a social shopping company” or “We are a search and discovery company” or “We are a music company” or “We are a dating company” or “We are a travel company” and so on. I see it over and over again, these companies and their agencies are so mired in the tech world, so caught up in the echo chamber, that they never break out, they stay inside and slowly whither away.

Who cares about the echo chamber? Who cares if they like your product or not? What every startup should be thinking about above all else is their market. How are you going to make money? Where is that money going to come from? And do everything in your power to make your product, your marketing communications, your brand, everything about your company, about one thing: Appealing to and serving the market that is going to make you profitable.

[Canyon image credit: James Marvin Phelps (Attribution)]

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Source:Mashable!

Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new solution called Ubiquity, which will try to bring a disjointed Web together under the auspices of that one solution.

Ubiquity will try to “connect the Web with language to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”  More specifically, Ubiquity will try to get users to type what they want to do instead of what they’re trying to find in a search box, enable more mashups to increase the usability of different Web services, and extend browser functionality to make it a hub for online solutions.

As part of its announcement, Mozilla Labs announced Ubiquity 0.1, which will demonstrate some of Ubiquity’s concepts and its potential.  This first release focuses more on the platform itself, which the subsequent release will “explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.”

Mozilla also said that Ubiquity 0.1 will allow “users to map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; look up and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more.”

At this point, Ubiquity is obviously a crude version of what could possibly be, but it promises more than it currently offers.  And by performing the kind of functions that are simply impossible today (Mozilla mentions the difficulty with which people can work together on mapping), Ubiquity could be the centerpiece of the Web’s evolution.  At the very least, Mozilla hopes so.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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We here at Mashable have shared with you a number of feature stories on how to extend your Firefox 3 experience. From must-have add-ons to social applications to gems that’ll help you communicate most effectively with friends, family, co-workers and so forth. Today there comes another set of top-tier add-ons picked from the growing goodie bag in the Firefox marketplace. This time, though, the chosen few have been selected by a group of six judges commissioned by Mozilla as part of a contest it has called Extend Firefox 3, sponsored by ActiveState, Last.fm, and VMWare.

From a pool of over 100 entries, just seven were chosen as grand prize winners in a series of three categories: Best New Add-on; Best Updated Add-on; Best Music Add-on. For both the Best New and Best Updated picks they decided on three first-place finishers each. The extensions left standing are as follows:

BEST NEW ADD-ON

Pencil - GUI prototyping and diagramming, making use of “SVG support in Firefox 3 to implement all the shape rendering and scripting.”

Tagmarks - One-click bookmark tagging.

HandyTag - Automatic bookmark tagging.

BEST UPDATED ADD-ON

Read it Later - Save interesting pages for future reading.

TagSifter - Browse bookmarks by tag.

Bookmark Previews - Adds album and thumbnail views to bookmark manager.

BEST MUSIC ADD-ON

Fire.fm - Access to Last.fm. ‘Nuff said.

Winners of the Best New category receive free travel and accommodation to a Mozilla Developer Day of their choosing, anywhere one might be held. They also net some cool gear and software, too. Winners of the Best Updated category get to stay where they are, but grab a new Macbook Pro. The Fire.fm guys, Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños, get to travel to Last.fm HQ in London and attend a Last.fm Presents show.

Just so we’re thorough, the judges deemed six runners up in the category of Best New, and we would be remiss not to relay the names. Without further adieu:

Webchunks - implementation of Internet Explorer Webslices, “plus more!”

Badges on Favicons - information badges to those nifty graphics we know and love.

Devo - the band is no more, but this command launcher is very much alive and kicking.

Close ‘n Forget - close tab and forget the visit. For those wild nights in Virtual Vegas, perhaps.

Callout - notification services of the OS for webpages and Greasemonkey scripts.

Reasy - RSVP reader.

It should be said that Extend Firefox 3 is not the inaugural developer add-on celebration. Extend Firefox 2, which officially opened its doors in 2007 and finished in early 2008, was something of a spectacle as well. At that time, Minimap Sidebar, SamePlace, and Shareaholic all took home the gold.

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In a move that could have a major impact on the way you surf the Web, the Mozilla Foundation today announced Snowl, an experimental solution designed to bring messaging and Web surfing together in the browser.

According to the company, Snowl is designed to answer the question of whether or not a browser can “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”  Mozilla believes that browsers are specially designed to address issues most users have in handling messages – weeding out the less important messages and navigating through the messages – and with Snowl, it aims to bring messaging platforms into one central location to let you surf the Web and handle messages at the same time.

Mozilla is still unsure of whether or not people will actually want to use the service and is opening up Snowl for us to figure that out.  But if it does become a desired application, Mozilla expects to offer “support for additional message sources like Facebook, AIM, and Google Talk; create an interface for writing and sending messages to enable true two-way conversations; and develop an API to make it easier for developers to build new experimental interfaces, e.g. an instant message view.”

There’s no way to tell if Snowl will be a success or if most users will even want to use the program.  But at first glance, it looks like a winner.

Let’s face it – it’s utterly annoying to switch back and forth between tasks to answer some messages and address other issues in AIM or Google Talk.  But if messaging was built into the browser, productivity would certainly increase and the overall usefulness of a standard Mozilla browser would skyrocket.

I don’t know about you, but I’m behind Snowl.

You can download Snowl here.

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The X-Files has inspired legions of fans since its television premier in September of 1993. Now, with the recent release of a second major movie, “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” there are a number of new sites dedicated to the franchise. We’ve put together a list of 20+ sites for X-Files fans and those new to the series.

There are a wealth of websites out there to keep any X-Phile busy for days. You can explore fan sites, read conspiracy theories, learn about David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson - the show’s main stars - and more.

Remember, “the truth is out there.”

Fan Sites

Duchovny.net - An unofficial site dedicated to information surrounding David Duchovny.

InsideTheX.co.uk - A site featuring complete transcripts of every episode of both of The X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, as well as the first movie and some DVD commentaries.

Red Wolf’s Episode Guide - Features tons of snippets from each episode with TV Guide-style synopsis. Entire guide can be downloaded as a PDF.

SciFi.com X-Files Forums - Active forums for devoted and casual fans of the series.

The Science Behind The X-Files - A site that discusses the scientific realities behind some of the show’s science-heavy episodes.

TheMareks.com - A detailed timeline of the show, the characters and major events the series discussed. Also has a guide to the alien conspiracy that ran throughout the series.

X-Files 101 - Makes it easy for anyone to jump into the X-Files phenomenon, even at this point in the franchise’s history.

X-Files Screen Grab Archive - Hundreds of screen grabs from every episode through the eighth season.

X-Files Wiki - After nine seasons on television and two feature films, you need a wiki just to keep the alien conspiracy straight.

X-Files.gr - Though it is is based in Greece it is also available in English and features episode notes, Winamp skins and more.

X-Files.host.sk - An enormous fan site with all of the usual trappings such as episode guide, character guide and so on, and the most amazing list of in-jokes I think I’ve ever seen on a fan site.

XFilesNews.com - The only fan site to be authorized by 20th Century Fox to cover the second movie.

XFilesUltimate.com - An active fan site with reviews, guides, highly trafficked forums and more.

XFRoadRunners.com - Has a nice multimedia archive of clips from seasons 8 & 9 of the series, The Lone Gunmen spinoff, personal appearances and more. Also has transcripts, humor, episode guide and more.

Official Sites

AllThingsAnnabeth.com - Official fan site of Annabeth Gish who played Special Agent Monica Reyes in the ninth season of the series.

BBC Official Site - Though they are no longer updating the site, the BBC site still has lots of information and photos for fans.

BillyConnolly.com - The long time comedian plays Father Joseph Crissman in the second movie, X-Files: I Want To Believe.

GillianAnderson.ws - Official website of the actress who portrays Agent Dana Scully.

XFiles.com - Official site of the popular series, now featuring information on the second movie.

XFilesFanClub.com - Official fan club of the series about paranormal investigations.

Xzibit.com - Hip hop artist who plays Agent Mosley Drummy in the second film.

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After several high profile departures in the past few months, Facebook is naming a new director of engineering today: Mike Schroepfer. Schroepfer comes to Facebook from Mozilla, where he was Vice President of Engineering and responsible for the development of Firefox.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued the following statement about the hire:

“Mike has a lot of experience building great products and engineering teams. At Mozilla, he built Firefox 3 and manages the product development process — a particularly impressive position given the global, collaborative and open process in which Mozilla operates and develops its products. Facebook has similar values and Mike will be a great addition to our engineering team.”

A number of early Facebook executives on the technical side have left recently, including CTO Adam D’Angelo and VP Product Management Matt Cohler. According to Facebook, the company is still looking to fill its VP Engineering role.

Schroepfer was named to PC World’s “50 Most Important People on the Web” in 2007 and previously worked at Sun Microsystems, where he was chief technology officer for the company’s data center automation division.

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Today is the big day - that’s right today is Firefox day! I have been waiting for weeks, have been practicing downloading, and even woke up early just to be ready. So I am all ready to download the Firefox 3 browser and be part of history - but the site is down. And when the Firefox site isn’t down, it’s pointing people to Firefox 2. To heck I say, let’s all go back to using Lynx - the world was a better place then - heck gas was 79c a gallon then.

If you are looking to download the Firefox 3 browser, here’s another location for immediate download we are told.

Don’t forget tonight’s party in NYC - I believe even if the Firefox/Mozilla sites are down, the party will still go on!

And check out:

• Corsin Camichel’s blog - he is liveblogging the entire event for the full 24 hours!
• Rafe Needleman at Webware is hosting a live chat

Update 2pm Eastern - the site is back and now there’s a groovy counter - there’s loads of numbers on the counter but nothing matches up so your guess is as good as mine!

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