Silverlight Momentum

The momentum for Silverlight is building both internally and externally.

• You probably heard by now that MLB.com integrated Silverlight on their site to bring a more interactive and enticing media experience to baseball fans around the world. Users can go to the video gallery to browse and view different game videos and share with their friends by email directly from the media player (see the left image below). In addition, the new media player can be integrated with existing written content (e.g. articles) so that users can get a better experience of reading the article and watching the matching video together (see the right image below).
• The Podium ’08 on MSN is Live! The latest edition to MSN’s Election 2008 coverage is the first of many innovations MSN will deliver on Silverlight. MSN integrated Silverlight into its publishing system and thus can create template driven applications like this one. Users can experience an engaging presentation of information about the US presidential candidates, their views on issues and lots of related articles and information.  Pick a candidate, select an issue and view the results, which are supplied by Live Search.

  

• Tafiti is a demonstration of Silverlight capabilities. Tafiti is essentially a mashup that uses the resources of Windows Live Search driven by a Silverlight top layer.  Although there are a number of usability issues, the experience of visualizing search results is very refreshing. Users can search results in newspapers, books, images, RSS feeds, and web. Moreover, they can filter their search results multiple times using any additional keyword. You can view a video walkthrough of the application here.

  search newspaper	search images	search RSS feeds

• MediaPreview.tv - I also came across this media news site powered by Silverlight. More ideas about how to deliver media content using Silverlight. More importantly, how to design navigation for these rich experience site? There's no conventional left/right navigation panel any more. It seems you can interact with every object on the site (i.e. they all look clickable), so there's a lot of discovery work for a user.

  

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