Anyone out there remember Live Clipboard? It was a very interesting incubation technology that came out of Microsoft’s Live Labs group way back in 2006 (I think) and how now been open sourced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It was also backed from way up on high – Ray Ozzie (now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and also the guy who took over from Bill Gates) was its chief backer. Live Clipboard was in fact one of the few technologies that Ray blogged about on his, now defunct, MSN Spaces blog but sadly that blog post is no longer available.
So, what was Live Clipboard? From the site itself:
“Live Clipboard uses JavaScript and standard XML formats to easily move data from one web site to another, or between the web and standard applications. It extends the clipboard concept (familiar to most computer users) to the web.”
(http://www.liveclipboard.org/)
In other words, it is copy and paste for the web. You may think we already have that; after all, I can copy and paste some text from a text box on one page into a text box on another web page; but that isn’t really what this is about. Live Clipboard used XML markup to describe the data that was being copied thus if that XML was a well-known representation of the data (e.g. a microformat) then the receiving website could act upon that data accordingly. The canonical example is the one given at http://www.liveclipboard.org/:
“Let's say you have two sites both of which understand calendar data. I want to move an appointment from one site to another. With Live Clipboard, there is now an icon on each site, next to each piece of data that can be transported. Bring site A to the front, click on the icon and choose Copy, then bring site B to the front, click on the icon and choose Paste.“
Its not hard to envisage many other uses for such a technology, http://microformats.org has a number of fledgling microformat specifications that could all benefit from Live Clipboard:
Imagine finding someone’s contact details on their website and easily being able to transport those details into your address book with a couple of clicks – that’s the promise of Live Clipboard and microformats. Copy and paste is nearing ubiquity for smart devices (iPhone is expected to announce support in the next couple of weeks) and I doubt anyone reading this would contemplate using a PC that didn’t support it so I’m surprised that this similar concept for the web hasn’t taken off.
A number of large organisations have started to support Microformats most notably Google who recently announced that Googlebot would start seeking out Microformats and Microsoft themselves who have released Oomph, a microformats toolkit. Given that the use of microformats is now taking off I’m surprised that Live Clipboard hasn’t been heard of in such a long time. Here’s hoping that changes soon because it sounds like a very useful technology and to a fella like me whose primary interest is data integration anything that uses well-known standards as a method of doing that is worthy of attention.
Does anyone out there have any information to share about Live Clipboard?
-Jamie
Links:
Live Clipboard main site - http://www.liveclipboard.org/
Live Clipboard on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Clipboard
UPDATE: Ray is well known for inviting people to contact him so I did that and asked him what had happened to Live Clipboard. Paraphrasing his reply: even though there was initial interest, once it was open sourced there was a lack of take-up within the wider web developer community.