Comments on: Baby Steps to Synergistic Web Apps

by: Noli San Jose

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 18:18:20 +0000

Ray Ozzie has just recently posted a blog (http://spaces.msn.com/rayozzie/PersonalSpace.aspx) referencing and acknowledging the ideas on this page.

by: Code4Lib2006 - Day 1 - Morning at ebyblog

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:09:53 +0000

[...] Since the conference this idea has taken off even more, but even then it was ramping up and I was interested in learning more. I haven’t been keeping as good of track as I should and don’t understand everything about it. My general understanding is that it is a simple microformat coupled with a simple API that allows you to move metadata for objects around. The official site says “unAPI is a tiny HTTP API for the few basic operations necessary to copy discrete, identified content from any kind of web application”. Your best bet is to go through the examples on the site. The one thing that is clear is that there is a need for the ability to copy/paste information on the web similar to copy/paste on the desktop. There’s also some posts by Jon Udell and over at Lesscode that may bring you up to speed on the issue. [...]

by: Ray Ozzie Got the Memo

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:17:03 +0000

[...] On March 7, in his talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Ray Ozzie, CTO Microsoft, demonstrated (short screencasts, live demo page) a method by which users can cut/copy/paste structured content between web applications and between web applications and Windows ones. Alert lesscode readers will notice that Ray’s blog post describing his inspiration and motivation for the idea bears a striking resemblance to my own post from last October. A deeper look at the screencasts, the live demo and the technical introduction remove any doubt that what Ray demonstrated, and in fact what Microsoft is offering under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (you heard me right) is in fact the Web Application Clipboard as described in that original lesscode post and followup. This is in no way meant to diminish the Microsoft folks’ brilliant implementation. The portable trick used to actually hook the browser’s built-in cut/copy/paste functionality is inspired. The design tradeoff resulting in a visible representation (scissors icon) of every clipboard-capable element is all their own, and quite frankly, is probably a necessary tradeoff if the Web Application Clipboard is to actually get traction. There’s a more technical analysis posted posted on my personal personal blog, but the executive summary is:Live Clipboard (Microsoft’s name for Web Application Clipboard) is awesome and I believe sites will adopt it. I wish the name weren’t “infected” with the Windows Live brand but that won’t matter a whole lot so long as the specification is good and open. Right now though I can’t find any specification at all but I’m keeping hope alive on that front anyway (you listening Gandi? MLK?)What I find more interesting than that technical stuff though is the amount of mindshare this thing got “all of a sudden”. First off, note that Ray’s March 7 blog post on this subject comprises the only thing he’s blogged since the end of January. A whole month of the Microsoft CTO’s time — how many dog-years is that? Now realize that the good guys over at the Gillmor Gang podcast spent a full 48 minutes on this single topic on March 16 (Ozzie Gang I, Ozzie Gang II), most of which was spent interviewing Ray Ozzie himself. They were downright effusive. From Ozzie Gang II:Mike Arrington 4:45“Does this signify any sort of shift organization where people in microsoft who have ideas that can help the Web … that they can also get things through the politics and through the system fast enough so it doesn’t take and years?”John Udell 17:52“Ray this is great. I just personally want to thank you for doing it. I think it’s a tremendous step.”Steve Gillmor 17:57“Yeah, and I think that everybody is knocked out that somebody with your intuition is in such a powerful position at Microsoft. You know, bringing Microsoft into the community has been very difficult to do and you seem to be doing it.”Dan Farber 18:31“I think as everybody on this call has said, we’re quite impressed with this very simple little notion that seems to be well executed and that it comes from Microsoft now really injecting itself into the big old Web community. It’s cool!”Dan Farber 19:13“If you go to the desktop and you consider cut and paste, copy and paste, you know it’s everywhere… to be able to do that on the web… it’s like a big gift — it’s a contribution to the Web”Mike Arrington 22:18“I think the big story here is that we’re starting to see with Ray’s leadership that Microsoft is able to do things that seem selfless and simply good for their own sake and SSE is one example and (Live Clipboard) is another stunning example…”Steve Gillmor 24:05“I think that Microsoft may well be on the threshold, whether they fully realize it or not at all levels of the organization, of winning by accepting a part in the community, and I think that’s a huge story.”Strange and wonderful times indeed. [...]

by: Bill Burcham’s memeRocket » Ray Ozzie Demos Web App Clipboard

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:03:00 +0000

[...] The approach requires no proprietary technology — instead relying solely on open standards: HTTP, XML, HTML, ECMAscript (JavaScript), DOM. This means it runs not only in IE but also in Firefox and Safari, for real, right now. (I just tried Opera 8.52 — no joy.) Microsoft has released the concept and code under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. As a result I see no intellectual property hangups associated with this thing. No Slugworths mumbling inducements for you to sell out. No grassy knolls. I do have a minor quibble on the IP front though: Ozzie dubs this technology “Live Clipboard” thus infecting the concept with the Microsoft “Windows Live” brand. I have been using the term “Web Application Clipboard” to describe the same concept for a while now. I prefer a “brand free” term — remember all the confusion caused by the infection of JavaScript with the Java brand? [...]

by: BrainBlog

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:00:32 +0000

More copy paste web on Ajaxian

I was playing with some new blog stats I found at http://performancing.com/ the other day. When I noticed Ajaxian picked up on the Copy-Paste-Web post from last week. Thanks to Chris Cornutt for the write up. Metapundit remarks that there...

by: metapundit.net

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:53:02 +0000

Ray Ozzie and Microformats

That said, I think some credit should be given to other people. I have no doubt that the idea occurred to Ozzie independently and he has gone so far as to implement something. It would be nice, however, if he mentioned Tantek Celik who has practically ...

by: Bogle’s Blog » The Web Clipboard is coming

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 18:10:17 +0000

[…] Last October, I blogged on Bill Burcham’s idea of a web clipboard. Web clipboard standardization is looking more and more likely to happen, based on the recent initiatives such as Live Clipboard and unAPI . (There are undoubtedly other efforts going on secret that we can expect to hear about soon.) […]

by: inkdroid » a citation microformat - when worlds collide

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 18:56:22 +0000

[...] Tim White has taken the time to prod the microformats list about the citation microformat that’s been floating around for a few months. It’s really encouraging that a developer at Gale is thinking of using a citation microformat. While I also work in the industry I’ve been coming at the citation microformat from a slightly different angle. For the past few months I’ve been monitoring activity in microformat land and also in another group and I’ve been watching them slowly come together. Recently, Bill Burcham’s Baby Steps to Synergistic Web Apps and Half a Baby Step confirmed my hunch that the two communities were converging. [...]

by: Half a Baby Step [@lesscode.org]

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:33:49 +0000

[...] In a previous post I proposed the notion of a web app clipboard. The basic idea was that AJAX could be used to request content from a source application. The content would land on the operating system clipboard in a simple format (the web app clipboard format) and could then be transmitted to a destination application. Now I’m thinking that the original proposal was overbold. As Ryan Tomayko intimated, there ought to be a way to marry the microformats approach with the web app clipboard. Perhaps its profitable to think initially in terms of the source content being scraped directly off the page, without requiring the additional request to the sourcing web app. We’ve got that functionality in hand. With that in hand we could focus on the other side of the equation — where to send the content. The effect would be that we would no longer have to create both producing and consuming applications — we could start with just consuming ones. [...]

by: Phil Bogle

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:38:03 +0000

I find Bill Burcham's shelf scenario compelling.

The form I would like this to take would be a clipboard stack in the cloud. That is, as I was browsing the web, I would like to be able to simply hit copy to add the current selection to the stack. (The selection could include text, images, and hyperlinks, of course.)

The clipboard stack would include a history of last 100 or so items I had copied. The stack would live on the server, so I could view it from whatever PC I happened to be browsing. AJAX would keep the browser view of the stack synchronized with the server.

As with Flock's shelf, I'd want to be able to perform various actions on the items in the stack-- insert into the current text entry field, search them, add the containing page to my bookmarks, etc.