You can now download all of the voice acting audio files we used in the pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone.

• Raw Audio – Everything as it was recorded, complete with outtakes and me yelling at Santo to stop making noise so we can record: Download everything | Download everything | Download individual files

It is legal for you to copy, share, modify, or reuse these files for any purpose. Please give credit to Plankhead if you do.

Or, more specifically, they’re licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

So, naturally, Google is showing Cyanogen their thanks for increasing the Google-use of 30,000 people by sending him a Cease and Desist letter. Wait, what?

Well, apparently some of Google’s applications aren’t open source, such as the Android Market (which allows you to give Google money indirectly by buying apps from developers, who then give a portion of their money to Google). Sure, you can easily download and install these apps yourself from the freely available developer repository, but Cyanogen had the audacity to save 30,000 end users the trouble of doing all that just so they could continue using Google’s products and making them money. That constitutes “distribution,” which only licensed developers who sent in $25 and the filled-out form from the back of the comic book work for Open Handset Alliance members can do. Never mind that there aren’t any alternatives to many of these applications, and they’re kind of essential for a lot of Android’s usefulness.

Admittedly, under the current Jurassic-era copyright law, Google has the legal right to do this. Cyanogen does not have the resources to license their software, thus he does not have the license to distribute it. But considering that Android, as a whole, is a free and open source operating system, and that Google has nothing to lose from CyanogenMOD and much to gain, this is a real dick move by the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

Personally, I would like to brutally murder the term “Web 2.0″ with katanas and fire. It annoys me. But regardless, I sorta kinda understand that when people say “Web 2.0″ they mean the era of the web where user-generated content (read: comments threads) became an essential part of everything. Also that whole social interaction stuff. But in the back of all these Web 2.0-loving people’s minds is the question, “What is Web 3.0?” Again, I have a profound moral and biological(?) objection to putting a version number after “web,” but I’m going to humor everyone and say what is absolutely essential if we ever want to get started on whatever “Web 3.0″ is: OpenID.

But the problem with OpenID is that it just identifies you, and perhaps passes along some little bits of info like your name and email address. Every one of those individual sites, whether they take OpenID or not, still requires you to maintain friends lists on all of them. And there’s no central hub to see what friends are doing all across the web. FriendFeed does not count, you still have to friend people again there too. If I use my OpenID at a site, and a bunch of my friends have done the same, I don’t want to go around adding them as friends there again. They’re my friends no matter where I go.

Then again, some people you meet on the web might be more “clients” or “contacts” or something than “friends,” per se, so keeping these relationships intact across the web would encourage people to stop “friending” everyone they see, and simply add them to the appropriate group; now you can finally show those photos of you getting drunk and stripping only to people you really trust. So it’s more of a “relationships” system.

Now, all this user-generated social stuff (Web Two Point Freaking Oh) didn’t really take off until the basics of the web, like HTML, were finally made (mostly) compatible with everything. So in order to move on to the next big trend in the web (Web 3.0, if you REALLY must), we have to make social networking work all across the web. So, let’s figure out how this OpenID-based (or complimentary) interpersonal relationships system would work.

First, let’s give it a name. Do you have any suggestions, Helvetica Bold 10 Dark Red?

How about OpenRelationships?

Hmm, uh, no, I’m not sure that’s the best connotation. You know what, just OpenID Friends works. Here’s what it should be…

OpenID (or some other open identification system) providers will not only keep track of stuff like a person’s name, email address, and anything else another website might need, but also Friends data. This would essentially be a small text-based database thing. I’m going to write an example in YAML because YAML is the best thing ever.

OpenID Friends
---
Mom:
    -ID: examplemom28.openidexample.com
    -Groups:
        -Family
Greg:
    -ID: xxmytorturedsoulxx.openwound.emo
    -Groups:
        -Family
        -Best Friends
    -Note |
          Brother.
Tracy:
    -ID: tracy-mclean.internetcompany.biz
    -Groups:
        -Colleagues
        -Best Friends
        -Secret Lovers
    -Note |
          My secretary.

And so on. You can add friends by just clicking an “add” button on a site where you see them, or by typing their OpenID into your provider’s website. Then you give them a nickname, put them into your personal groups, and make notes about them. Perhaps there’d be an additional section at the end with people who have added you to their friends list, but you haven’t added back yet. And then every website which can take your OpenID will interpret your friends list and act accordingly. Either a website would send notifications (like, “you got a comment!”) back to your provider, who would then inform you, or just email you directly, depending on your personal preferences. And that’s it.

That’s it?

Yes, Helvetica Bold 10 Dark Red. That’s it.

So that’s all it’ll take to fix the problems with social networking?

Um, yes.

Why hasn’t this been done yet?

I was just about to ask the same thing.

UPDATE CONT’D: PortableContacts seems to have all the necessary components. It seems more complex than it is, and definitely needs someone to write a human-readable usage guide, but other than that it’s rather nice. Why the hell is it still in draft? Implement this. Now. And put it on Wikipedia, dammit, it practically doesn’t exist without an article there.

Now for the long version. Ubiquity, according to Wikipedia, “allows web users to create mashups of other web services without requiring much technical background.” Thank you, Wikipedia, for this accurate description which completely and entirely misses the point. They also state, “Ubiquity is a collection of easy and quick natural-language-derived commands that allow users to get information and relate the same to current and other webpages.” That’s more like it. Yeah, I should really edit the article to clarify those two sentences. Brb.

"Goo"gling with Ubiquity - OMG AWESOME!

Okay, there we go. Now that Wikipedia agrees with me, it must be true, so Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that lets you type natural-sounding commands at your browser to make it do things that would normally require 3722438 clicks. And it is the best thing like ever.

Instead of going to Google to do a search for, say, “pandas using iphones”, and then clicking the search button, then clicking the result, you use Alt-Space (Control-Space on Windows/Linux) to open Ubiquity, and type “google pandas using iphones”. And it will load the results. Right there. No new page. Then you can click on one of the results and it loads!!! (Okay, so that’s only two clicks turned into one, but it’s definitely faster, especially since just typing “goo” is enough for Ubiquity to fill in the “gle”).

Wikipedia in Ubiquity - WHEEEEE!

And speaking of Wikipedia, you can search that with Ubiquity. At the moment all you get are small previews of the articles, but that’s probably enough to curb incidents of wiki-time. Again, simply typing “wiki” is sufficient, and a quick press of the Down arrow key will switch to the “link-to-wikipedia” command, which will paste a link to whatever Wikipedia article you type into whatever you’re typing.

Know what you want, but not what the command is? Ubiquity has tags.

The great thing is that commands seem to have tags, so you can type “image” to bring the “flickr” command onto the list. By default, it’s below “google-image” because that actually has “image” in its name, but it gives you the feeling that this thing is very, very smart.

But the amount of things you can do beyond that are absolutely ridiculously awesome. Here’s one of the developers, Aza Raskin, showing us some of the more interesting things Ubiquity can help you do in a voice that reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s:

That ability to add a customized map to Gmail without leaving the page is really nifty. It also proves that this thing could, theoretically, do anything. It’s like Quicksilver for the web. And the best part is how you can add new commands, which is probably the best idea for extending software since…well, since ever.

IM IN UR UBIKWITEE DOWNLOADIN UR COMMANDZ

Commands for Ubiquity are pretty easy to make, so naturally lots of people have jumped on it. But you don’t have to download anything to use their commands. Instead, they publish a Ubiquity feed, and you subscribe to that. Then Ubiquity will grab that new command, and (if you checked the auto-update box) automatically get updates to it entirely transparently. Okay, so it’s pretty much the same thing as “automatically update my plugins” but it feels more natural and automatic for some reason.

But those Alpha-y rough edges I was talking about before? Jono DiCarlo, also on the Ubiquity dev team, mentions that Ubiquity commands are very inconsistent:

Currently, using Ubiquity is like programming in PHP — where some standard library functions are_like_this() and other functions areLikeThis(). I have to look up the names of functions almost every time I use them in PHP, because there’s no consistency.

It’s not going to be as simple as adding a standard, because Ubiquity commands can’t contain spaces, only hyphens. This means you can’t say “email Dave with gmail”, which would be a very, very natural way of doing things (hint, hint, Jono, though that’s probably the solution you’re going to announce in your upcoming post). But considering the developers have come this far with the amount of epic win in Ubiquity, I’m sure they’ll come through.

By the way, the company that the Ubiquity developers also have (they’re doing Ubiquity for Mozilla Labs, so it’s not under their company name) has something called Enso, which appears to be a Ubiquity-esque thing for your entire computer. I’m not positive, since it’s Windows-only at the moment, and I’m not interested in booting into XP if I’m not going to use it much.

But long story short, Ubiquity is absolutely vital for your enjoyment of life. Get it.