Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s CTO, had a thought for a new service about a month ago. Today, he launched it at eTech and through Dave Winer’s Scripting News.
The core idea is a new open standard, called Live Clipboard, which allows the copy and pasting of data, including dynamic, updating data, across and between web applications and desktop applications. Microformats for things like calendar entries, contact information, etc. will use common clipboard data formats. Ray wrote on his blog today:
Simply stated, I’d like to extend the clipboard user model to the web.
A few weeks ago, I approached my brother Jack – who leads a Concept Development team in my group at Microsoft – and visually sketched out and storyboarded some end-to-end user scenarios that I wanted to try to accomplish. The scenarios were all centered on this new clipboard user model.
The team took me up on the challenge, and in a few short weeks had accomplished all of the scenarios, and more. And they did it using techniques that are incredibly simple, and which work securely and are browser independent.
Today at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference, I’m sharing this new concept – through a brief demo and through hallway discussion.
I call this new concept Live Clipboard, because we view “live” efforts as those providing users with seamless end-to-end scenarios that “just work” by weaving together the best of software and the best of services.
The Concept Development team has created a screencast of a Live Clipboard demo, and a simple web page-based demo that you can play with. Hopefully this will convey more vividly some of what I’ve attempted to explain above.
Go through the demos and sample live page above to get a feel for how it will work. The last couple of demos which show piping of dynamic information across applications are mind bending. This can change the way we use the web, by associating XML feeds with chunks of content instead of entire pages or sites.
Woah. Amazing.
Awsome, this is a really great application.
dude. that is sick
He is amazing. He is changing organization like MS and bring them back into society:)
So, it’s basically taking XML elements from one XML document and cut-copy-pasting it into another document.
My god that’s actual real architecture! What’s that man doing working for MS?
A good idea from M$…they’re bound to screw it up then.
Does anybody know if this has been patented or is in the process of being patented by Microsoft? Did anybody ask the question?
IF its in the public domain as idea, then way cool, if not then not so cool.
There are no mentions of patents so far, but I would imagine it would not be weighted down by patents, as this would weaken general adoption. Microsoft really need adoption of this stuff in order for it to succeed. They are using the creative commons license :
/* Copyright 2006 Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft’s copyrights in this work are licensed under the Creative Commons */
/* Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5 */
As you can see in the scripts.
Personally I think Ray and Microsoft are being straight up and honest about this one. If you developing for the web you need to take note of what these guys are doing, they will be bringing some awesome toys to the web 2.0 party as I mentioned in Folknology
I personally applaud what they are doing here (not my normal stance with MS)
regards
Al
I’ve written a (slightly deeper) analysis of what’s going on here. The data objects being transfered for calendaring and contact information were not defined by Microsoft (as was claimed in O’Reilly’s transcription of Ozzie’s speech) but in fact were hCard and hCalendar, which represents a significant piece of work on the part of Tantek Çelik and the microformats community over the last year.
I’m sure this may be an oversight but I think this is place where credit should be given where credit is due.
they’re releasing their work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license
wow.
It’s great to see MSFT pushing a trend instead of following. They’re really started to move - even if slowly.
Ray talks about how the copy-paste will work between browsers and within a single web application, but I guess he is not talking about the bigger picture.. Copy paste between a desktop application and the web.
Imagine you have a meeting scheduled in your Outlook, you just copy the meeting “mail” and paste it on Live.com
However it would really be helpful If the copy-paste would work with just about any web-fragment.
Yep thats exactly what im thinking. For example comunicating directly with utlook (something I want to do for a large web app without using platform specific components and paying through the nose).
I hope those ’specs’ they are defining are based on such ideas - desktop apps intergation, ideally via open standards (where available) e.g. iCal.
Im definetly very excited if this is the case, otherwise its nice but limited.