Mozilla Corp on Tuesday released Ubiquity an experiment to connect web with a language or a command line to run daily tasks more quickly and more easily. Ubiquity is a sort of a Mozilla plugin which helps in creating command lines for different web tasks or you can say which can help you create mashups that get activated on the commands you set for it.

What really Ubiuquity is ?

According to Mozilla the main goal of Ubiquity is to give users the power to create mashups that can fetch data of there choice with a single command from different websites. It can be a sort of web agent that instead of forcing you to search will get data of your choice from your recommended web properties. With Ubiuquity you can set up commands to manipulate web tasks like mapping, translation, shopping or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp or Google Maps any many more.

What can i do with Ubiquity ?

If you happen to plan vacation your process of planning would be to first search the list of good vacation spots, then you would find about air fares and available flights, then hotel reservation and compare their price and then of course you want to fetch the map of the location along with pictures of the spot this kind of task can consume allot of your time. For each task you make searches, sort and compare records. But with ubiquit you can simply set up a command line stating ‘vacation’ and create mashup that will fetch data from various websites of your choice including vacation spots, air fares, hotel reservation, and Google maps of the location with just one command line ‘vacation’ & help you compare and make descions. Thus instead of spending more time on search you can create your own web agent that will perform all such tasks for you.

How to install configure Ubiquity ?

The current version is prototype and is available at Mozilla website for free download, you can follow their tutorial to install the application here.

Mac Users > You’ll need to install Growl. This is a Mac OS X system extension that applications can use to display unobtrusive transparent messages. Ubiquity uses Growl notifications to show you the output of commands and tell you about errors.

Windows Users > On Windows (XP and later), you don’t need to install anything special, as Ubiquity will use the operating system’s built-in “toaster”-style pop-up messaging.

Linux Users >On Linux, we don’t have a good messaging system yet. If you have a suggestion for how Ubiquity can display messages on Linux (preferably in a way that will work on all major distros and window managers), please tell us about it.

Source Mozilla Labs, Ubiquity Tutorials

Thought orkut have not opened this channel of customized theme but people have found a way around of changing the themes of the orkut pages. But this change hardly makes any difference, firstly you can change the theme to the one you like but that theme will only be viewable to you only and not your friends.

Still if you want you can change the theme and a get a new look you would need:

1. Mozilla Firefox ( a free web browser)
2. GreaseMonkey or Stylish (firefox plugins)

If you don’t want to use Mozilla Firefox you can change the orkut theme with Internet Explorer as well just install

1. Internet Explorer 7
2. Trixie Plugin for IE

Once you have installed the plugins restart you browser, and then either go to [orkutplus] or go to userscripts install the scripts and start enjoying the themes. Though previously orkut experimented by releasing a theme for Holi an Indian holiday for Indian users only so very soon orkut will be officially launching the ability to chose your own theme.

5 essential Firefox Addons for Social Networking
Why not bring your social network life into your browser, i have collected and organized a list of Firefox Ad Ons that will bring our favorite social networking life into our browser, it will add ease of use to access, modify and update with sites like facebook, twitter, digg, YouTube.

Social Networking Addons for Firefox
1- Facebook Extension for Firefox.
First Comes “Facebook” with an average of above 150 million user subscription, facebook has made its self the no1 social networking website. So the “Facebook toolbar for Firefox” is an essential.

Once installed the Facebook Toolbar brings your facebook life to your browser every time you open up the browser you are logged into facebook, you can search facebook, get notified of the pokes, friends requests and messages you receive. A pop-up will notify when friends update there status, write a note or interact with you on facebook. You can also open your friends sidebar, sort them and keep in touch with them. Apart from that if you run groups or a network on facebook you can share content directly from your browser what else do you need. (more…)