Clipboard for the web

Ray Ozzie: Wiring the Web (via Ben Metcalfe).

This is one of the most sensible proposals about innovating on the web and info sharing, re-packing and moving technologies that I’ve seen since… well, forever really. I also thought I’d call this “the only web2.0 thing that has any real content and value to it”. But I hate the whole web2.0 meme, so I don’t.

Clipboard is the ÜBERtool. I’m using it something like hundreds of times a day. The fallback plaintext mode always works. It supports UTF8 so you can move around internationalized content with weird characters with no problems. Some apps sometimes have rich-text-awareness problems and richtext from one app becomes f*ckeduptext in another, but it’s on the way there — at least among apps from one vendor (say Microsoft, or Mozilla/Firefox), it works great, and mostly also across vendors.

As browsers are on the way to become the überUItools for anything and taking over more and more dedicated clientside apps, I’m sure this live clipboard thing will make many things possible that we couldn’t do easily before, especially as they’re sharing it with a Creative Commons license and not keeping it fully proprietary.