News Flash
This week, Mozilla Labs released Ubiquity which is a new way to interact with your web browser. If you didn’t get the memo earlier this week, you control your browser with language instead of clickity-clicking. Instead of flipping from tab to tab, a simple key click allows users to TELL a browser what to do (ex: you need a map embedded into an email… instead of opening a new tab, typing maps.google.com and searching for the address, clicking the “embed” or “link” button, going back to your original tab, and pasting the code into your emailer without an instant map image). Don’t get it? Watch the video in this article… we’ll wait…
New Commands
Commands are the words you type in to control the actions of your browser. Coders have come out in full force writing hundreds upon hundreds of new commands and you are welcome to check every single one out on your own, but I just looked at them all (as of today) and narrowed it down to the Top 35 Ubiquity Commands:
- URL Shorteners:
- (1) TinyURL
- (2) Bit.ly
- (3) Hurl
- (4) Multiple Shorteners
- Resources:
- (5) Urban Dictionary Search
- (6) Search Wikipedia
- (7) Cambridge Dictionary
- (8) Dictionary & Thesaurus
- (9) Google News Search
- (10) Google Blog Search
- (11) Google Book Search
- (12) Search Amazon
- (13) People Search
- (14) UK Searches
- Social Media Commands:
- (15) Add Page to Google RSS Reader
- (16) Add Page to Google Bookmarks
- (17) Long Reply (for Twitter)
- (18) Get a Twitter Status
- (19) Search Twitter
- (20) Various Twitter Commands
- (21) Stumble
- (22) Reddit
- (23) Friend Feed
- (24) Identi.ca
- (25) MySpace Person Search
- Emailer Commands
- (26) Add a Signature
- (27) Go to Gmail
- (28) Calendar Visualizer
- (29) HTML Font Commands
- Extras
- (30) Weather Forecast
- (31) Reverse Phone Lookup
- (32) Rotten Tomatoes
- (33) Fire.fm
- (34) Last.fm
- (35) Ping.fm
What Now?
Download Ubiquity, subscribe to some of the commands and become more productive! To subscribe to a command, just click the subscribe button as you see below (click to enlarge):
So what commands will YOU be trying out? Which commands will you NOT be trying on for size?
PS: Here are three bonus commands that I *love*… icanhascheezburger term search, insert random a dog image and get movie times in your zip code. Cheers!
Lani is the COO and News Director at The American Genius, has co-authored a book, co-founded BASHH, Austin Digital Jobs, Remote Digital Jobs, and is a seasoned business writer and editorialist with a penchant for the irreverent.

Aza Raskin
August 30, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Thanks for taking the time to do this. It’s a great resource!
Tyler, The Wealth Creation Guy
August 31, 2008 at 1:06 am
Lani – You rock for posting these. Keep up the great work.
I wouldn’t have heard about Ubiquity w/o AG! Now, I’m addicted.
Timofei Shatrov
September 1, 2008 at 6:47 am
I added a preview option to my urban dictionary command (which seems to be very popular for some reason). So, whoever is using it needs to resubscribe or it could update automatically if you are auto-subscribed to it.
Karl Morris
September 3, 2008 at 7:55 am
I’ve created a Ubiquity command for AutoSMS. You can send SMS messages to persons in your AutoSMS phonebook with the simple command: “sms to “, where name is a uniquely identifiable portion of a name in your phonebook. Of course using standard Ubiquity convention, could be replaced with “this” to use a selected block of text from the website you are viewing.
Timothy Sorbera
September 3, 2008 at 8:10 am
Cool! My Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus commands are on there! (number 8)
🙂
simon
October 3, 2008 at 5:28 am
The “babylon command” is awesome 😀
Mortgage Mods
April 11, 2009 at 2:17 am
Very well written. This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s. Keep up the good work.
san diego homes sale
July 3, 2010 at 2:31 pm
These tools have been great for improving efficiency as I work on my san diego real estate site. Appreciate you pointing them out.