Tonight I am trying out the new Mozilla Ubiquity plugin. It is very experimental, to be sure- I have found lots of things that don’t work (especially in Linux) but the things that do are amazing- especially for such an early prototype.
A few commands I can imagine myself using right away and on a regular basis:
twitter: You can post directly to Twitter, or select text and insert it into twitter using the word “this”
calc: useful for quick calculations
add-to-calendar and check-calendar: I’ve been wanting an “add to calendar” function for google calendar for a long time. I can’t get this to work quite right, but it’ll be useful once I figure it out. The check calendar command is really useful too.
define, wikipedia: I am constantly looking up words, so this will definitely come in handy. The wikipedia command lets you see things in a little more depth.
edit-page, highlight, stop-editing-page: This combination of commands has the potential to be REALLY useful. For instance: say there’s a page you end up going to a lot to get a bit of information. With these commands, you can edit the page to highlight the information so next time you go it’s very visible. Not sure what happens when they edit the page, though. (EDIT: I found out what happens when you annotate and save a page: you always get your annotations, even if the page has changed. I think this is pretty dangerous, since you can miss updated information this way. Use with care!)
email, last-email: The email integration looks like it has a lot of potential, but I couldn’t get it to work for me in my quick tests. I could use the last-email function, which was a nice way to quickly peek at your inbox (provided you are using gmail.)
link-to-wikipedia: This could be a huge help in blog posts, and one could imaging a host of other such commands. Basically, you highlight a word, invoke this command, and a link to wikipedia of the search term you highlighted is automatically inserted. I used this to insert that last link to Wikipedia.
map, map-these: map is already working- more or less. map-these is experimental. With map, you can highlight an address, invoke map, and then insert that map in a new email, etc. I could see map-these being really powerful combined with firefox 3′s ability to select multiple areas of text.
This little plugin has amazing potential. You are sure to hear a lot about it in the coming weeks!