What do you do when it's 3a.m., you're sleepy, hungry, have hardly ventured your nose out of the door for the whole day, and someone pops up in your contact list who also happens to be to a serious Ubiquity hacker?

Why, of course you gently coerce him into helping you write your first Ubiquity command. About an hour of more sleep deprivation later, the im Ubiquity for Firefox/SamePlace has somehow come into existence (click image to enlarge):

The command is available through this GitHub gist and works on SamePlace development branch. (And yes, all it takes to publish a Ubiquity command on GitHub is pasting into a text area. You can even fork it with a single click and keep editing it on the web, without git. Sweet.)

Probably the feature that hooked people the most in Firefox 3 was the awesome bar. And for good reasons: what once required browsing through bookmarks, or re-googling faintly recalled keywords, or (heaven forbid) typing a whole URL, now only takes a bunch of keystrokes.

With that in mind, why not also cut on the amount of actions to perform when pinging friends, and make instant messaging a little more "instant"? Not a big deal if your whole contact list fits the screen and you can always reach everyone with a click, but for me and for most people I know, that time is long past.

So here's a touch of awesomeness for your contacts:

Goodies available through the development branch as usual.

Question: as this kind of minimal text-interface opens up a rich array of possibilities, what else do you imagine doing through it? Searching in previous chats? Adding and removing contacts? More?

Sometimes, the wisdom about “small, incremental changes” just has to fly out of the window, so last week I began landing the most drastic changes to SamePlace user interface since the Firefox extension contest.

Here's a teaser of 1) the dashboard, 2) the chat panel, 3) the stream panel (click to enlarge):