Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief technology officer, introduced Live Clipboard during his speech at this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in San Diego -- rough transcript here. Ozzie remembered how DOS users benefited from the ability to cut and paste between what were essentially single-tasking applications using the clipboard. Web sites are roughly equivalent to single tasking applications, so Ray got the Windows Live team working on ways to cut and paste between Web sites.
Sure, we can cut and paste text string fragments from here to there, but the excitement on the web these days is all about "structured data" such as Contacts and Profiles, Events and Calendars, and Shopping Carts and Receipts, etc.
Ozzie has written about the idea on his MSN Spaces blog, and there's a screencast of a Live Clipboard demo, and a simple web page-based demo. The Live Clipboard web control is a DHTML control, and the practical info is here. There's also a discussion at: LIVE-CLIP@DISCUSS.MICROSOFT.COM. Ozzie adds:
There are quite a few key influencers attending ETech, and it's my aspiration that many of them, and many of you, will embrace this nascent technique, and "make it real" by working with us. The goal is to create a standard that works across many different scenarios, many different types of websites, and many different PC-based applications. In the same vein as Simple Sharing Extensions, we're releasing our work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
There are some photos of the talk on Flickr.
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