Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, has announced a framework that brings the power of the clipboard to the web page.
Ray gave an example of some contacts on a webpage that he could copy with a single click into the clipboard and paste somewhere else in the webpage.
But the cool thing was the ability to copy data from one webpage and inject it into another. Ray copied an event from Eventful and pasted it into the Windows Live Calendar application. It knew which date to insert the entry into because the date is defined in the microformat XML that was held in the clipboard.
Some other examples were pasting in credit card details during e-commerce payment and pasting in postage addresses for delivery details.
Ray Ozzie also said that he felt that despite the drive to integrate RSS viewing in browsers, he still felt stand-alone aggregators would be popular.
He then went onto to demonstrate an interesting example of this technology with feed urls. He copied an RSS url and pasted it directly into a suitably mocked up BlogLines account. It’s definitely a great example of solving the one-click-subscribe issue.
Ray then demonstrated a slightly different take on the technology. He showed an example whereby his facebook entry could subscribe to a tiny feed of his currently location that existed on his blog. He called this “wiring the web”, which of course by-passes the clipboard on the local desktop.
The “wiring the web” idea came into it’s own when he then fed the live location feed of his colleagues (powered by GPS on their mobile phones) into Virtual Earth, which then dynamically updated in real time where those colleagues were. A live ‘chained’ subscription.
Finally, Ray completed the loop by demonstrating an example of a clipboard feed on a Flickr site that would allow you to copy a single picture or an entire Flickr stream and paste it straight into the windows file system. At that point the pictures began to download to the computer. Way cool.
The power behind this is a new XML data format that defines clipboard entries that can traverse both the desktop space and the web space. And the really great thing is that Ray said this worked on IE7 and the latest versions of Firefox and Safari.
If you want to find more you can check out Ray’s blog.
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