Monday 1 November 2010

Silverlight, PivotViewer and TweetPivot. Where now?

Unless you've been living under a virtual rock for the past few months you couldn't have escaped the gossip surrounding Silverlight's future. At its heart is the suggestion that Microsoft may be ditching it in favour of the new HTML5 standard. At this year's PDC Bob Muglia made a slight gaff during interview that further flamed the dissent on this technology. He has since written a blog post clarifying his position.

So, let me clarify our position at TweetPivot.

Yes, we are a Microsoft-centric company. We are proud members of the BizSpark program and use Microsoft development environments, tools and frameworks to deliver our solutions. And that's the key - they're just tools. The PivotViewer control is a fantastic piece of work originally created by the Live Labs team. It does quite a few things that we don't utilise and it doesn't do a whole host of things we'd like it to; but it's a starting point.

PivotViewer and, indeed, Silverlight have enabled us to get going with our ideas about how people should be interacting with social media. What is core to what we do are our ideas, not the technology we use to implement them.

We have a very strong internal product road-map that will enable us to deliver our ideas to all devices and form-factors. Technologies will come and go, but our ideas are independent of these changes and remain of great value to our users.