When thinking about the Social Web, it’s important not to spend all your time with your head in the cloud (as it were). There are important factors influencing the shape of things online that happen all the way down the ladder from the Web to the user sitting at their computer.

For instance, the wide availability of broadband Internet connections is a major part of what makes Web 2.0 different from Web 1.0. There wasn’t streaming video during the original Internet bubble because people didn’t have fast enough connections. Now it’s a staple of any discussion of the Web.

But little things matter too. Consider a different bandwidth problem: the one between the human and computer. It’s not often thought about, but our connection to the big Web of people and ideas passes from us through fingers tapping on a keyboard and comes back through eyes focused on a screen.

Something on that front has been changing recently. Places like Lifehacker have been noting for a while that there’s been a resurgence of the command line: a text entry field used to give instructions to that computer rather than by pointing and clicking. The graphical user interface (GUI, the pointing and clicking) is so familiar now that it’s difficult to remember that there was a time when everything was done with the keyboard.

Representing everything graphically and spatially made it a lot easier to learn to use a computer. It was an important factor in allowing personal computing to go mainstream. But it’s also limiting in important ways. Having to do most tasks with a mouse takes time—it’s a lower bandwidth way for a user to communicate with a machine and thus to other users.

A little while ago, Mozilla began a project to change this by introducing a keyboard-based user interface to their Firefox browser called Ubiquity:

Lately some of us at Mozilla Labs have been experimenting with graphical keyboard user interfaces in Firefox. Our current work-in-progress is something that we’re calling Ubiquity for the time being, though the name is by no means set in stone.

This project is heavily informed by Enso, a software product developed by me and my colleagues at Humanized from 2005-07. Aside from the benefits outlined in Alex Faaborg’s blog post entitled The Graphical Keyboard User Interface, this experiment is intended to solve few other problems, one of which I’ll address in this post.

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it’s difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox’s UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don’t scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they’re running on; and Greasemonkey doesn’t prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

Our new project attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they’re looking at. (Toolness)

Originally, Ubiquity offered a limited number of functions. Now, largely due to contributions to the project from users, there’s many, many more—notably text editing tools. There’s nothing more irritating that having to confront some unexpected pop-up window when trying to italicize something in a text fields used for Web applications, like a blog posting page. If this fixes that, it means one can compose in a browser window without having to lift hands from keyboard to use the mouse to click and drag down menus. That might sound trivial, but it’s a big time and effort saver for anyone who blogs a great deal or otherwise composes for the social Web . It might only impact early adopters, but it could mean that they are each willing and able to post a little bit more content and little bit faster.

There would be a wider bandwidth connection from brain to blog post. That’s a factor (if a small one) in what shape the blogosphere takes in the future, and that matters to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It’s not just the heavily funded, headline-making new Web applications that determine the direction the social Web will take. There are a whole lot of little things that subtly influence that evolution, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to predict where it will go.