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[Axiom-developer] Web-to-PC Clipboard


From: root
Subject: [Axiom-developer] Web-to-PC Clipboard
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:29:45 -0500

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181501850&cid=RSSfeed_tWk_All

Microsoft Debuts Web-To-PC Clipboard

The ability to cut-and-paste across Web sites, called "Live
Clipboard," is going to be freely available under Creative Commons
license. To further emphasize the point, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie
demonstrated the tool with Firefox instead of using Internet Explorer.

By Reuters
InformationWeek

Mar 8, 2006 08:10 AM

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. extended an olive branch to some
of its harshest critics on Tuesday by proposing a way for Internet
users to "cut and paste" live Web data across different sites, just as
they can between computer programs.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, told a conference of
top Web developers here that his company wants to openly license a
simple technology for sharing data between Web and computer programs
-- whether Microsoft-controlled or not.

"Live Clipboard," as the concept technology is known, would take the
widely used clipboard feature common to many computer programs and
extend it to the Web, allowing users to share organized data between
Web sites or move it into PC programs.

In a slide show demonstration, Ozzie showed how users could simply cut
and paste complex structured information from one Web site to another,
or move the same data, preserving its formatting, to programs running
on Windows desktop computers.

He copied personal contact information out of his computer address
book into an online shopping checkout page, filling out the order
processing pages in a quick gesture, for example.

"It allows the user to copy structured information from one place to
another in a non-geeky fashion," Ozzie told roughly 1,000 programmers
and Web developers attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
conference under way here this week.

The O'Reilly conference is an intellectual hothouse for Web developers
who gather each year to debate how best to build a new generation of
collaborative software based on open source software principles that
pose a big challenge to Microsoft.

Striking a decidedly humbler tone than older generations of Microsoft
executives, Ozzie showed how his Web-sharing prototype can work on a
variety of non-Microsoft Web sites.

To emphasize his point, Ozzie used the open source Firefox browser
rather than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser.

"It's impressive stuff," said Doc Searles, a co-author of iconoclastic
marketing manual "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and a leading open source
advocate. "It shows the amount of change that has occurred in
Microsoft management."

Sam Ruby, an IBM engineer who is director of the Apache Software
Foundation, whose open source software is widely used to run Web
servers, also said he was keen to give the Web clipboard software a
try, but still needed to be convinced of Microsoft's commitment to
open standards.

Ozzie copied a calendar entry from the independent event listings Web
site Eventful and pasted it into that his Outlook calendar, moving not
just text, but all of the appropriate elements that made up the full
appointment entry.

In a more dramatic attempt to impress the geeky audience, Ozzie took
location-tracking data that appears on his personal blog that monitors
his movements via his cellphone and pasted it onto the page of
youthful social networking site Facebook.

He then copied an updating list of his contacts from Facebook into a
Microsoft Web-based mapping application and the locations of his
contacts immediately appeared as flags on the map. Ozzie posted an
example on his blog at
http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclips
ample/clipboardexample.html

Ozzie said he conceived of the idea a month ago while mulling the
history of how computer user interaction had evolved over the past two
to three decades. He asked a project team including his brother, Jack
Ozzie, to implement his idea.

Live Clipboard is based on JavaScript and standard data formats widely
used by Web developers. "This is not platform specific," Ozzie said,
using industry jargon for operating systems like Microsoft Windows or
Apple Mac OS X software.

Microsoft also plans to freely license the software under the Creative
Commons license, requiring only that Microsoft receive attribution for
its work and that any improvements to the code are shared with other
developers.

"It's a little gift to the Web," he said.





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