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I’ll be presenting at the STIRR mixer on Wednesday night in Palo Alto. If you’re there, please stop by and say ‘Hi!’ to me or Clint.

It’s been a long time coming, and now Gliffy is out the door ready for the world to see.

• Give it a try
• See examples
• Gliffy blog post

Clint and I presented Gliffy at the OpenLaszlo meetup last night. I wrote up a quick summary over on the Gliffy Blog.

Clint has been working his butt off on Gliffy while I’ve been doing some consulting work to pay the bills. One of the nifty features in the new version of Gliffy is the publishing feature. Here is a sample (click to enlarge):

If I make a change to this flow chart using the Gliffy diagram editor, the change will instantly be reflected in this blog posting with no additional effort.

Clint posted a screen shot of our upcoming beta release of Gliffy. It’s looking really great!

The Gliffy closed beta has begun. We’ll slowly add more user to the beta in the next several weeks/months. Browse on over to http://www.gliffy.com and you can see our new home on the web. In fact, as of today, we are no longer Silver Tie Software, but Gliffy, Inc. Our first application is a diagram editor. Imagine Visio deployed over the web, with instant collaboration features. Interested in joining the beta? Send an email to info@gliffy.com.

A lot of hard work from many people helped to make this happen. A short list:

• Clint Dickson - Founder - Director of Engineering
• Lyla Warren - Founder - Creative Director
• Dana Yobst - Early involvement with Biz Dev and more
• Andrew D. Toebben and Gundersen Dettmer - Legal
• Henry Lyne - Helped us build out soon to be defunct http://www.silvertie.com
• Jason Lee - Helped talk through technical and strategic issues
• Dennis Yang - Provided us valuable insight early on
• Jo Ann Promponsatorn - Accounting advice
• Mom & Dad - I might need a loan from you soon!
• …and everyone else who listened to me talk non-stop about what we’re doing, providing feedback, etc.

I haven’t had much time to post recently as we’ve been super busy getting Gliffy in shape for a closed Beta launch which is scheduled Real Soon Now. If you’re interested in getting in on one of the early rounds of the closed Beta, drop me a line.

Sam at Writely kicks off a conversation about a common interoperability API between all these new applications popping up. We totally agree that such an API would make applications such as ours way more useful. Here are some examples of how such an API might be used:

• You’re composing a blog entry, and want to incorporate a spreadsheet from NumSum to get a point across.
• You’re working on a business plan in gOffice and you want to plug in some photos of the founders directly from Flickr.
• When working on a document in Writely, and you want to refer to a project management schedule in Basecamp.

With open API’s, you could certainly build custom integrations between all of these pieces. However, imagine if there was a a single standard API that everyone used for the general case, making integration a snap!

Here are some features I’d like to see in such an API:

• Single sign on and Identity management, using an open standard
• Ability to list and select resources from other services (Maybe using OPML)
• Ability to easily import documents from one service, and embed them in another, even if the imported document is not publicly published to the world.
• All the while keeping in mind that the user experience must be easy and seamless

This isn’t the only type of integration imagined by folks. For example, GoingOn is a manifestation of an idea Marc Cantor has often talked about: The Digital Lifestyle Aggregator.

Update: Sam has created a Writely doc to get the ball rolling on this. If you’re interested in collaborating on this, drop him a line.

I read two blog posts recently, both from VC’s, which show folks are starting to grok the reality that collaborative internet based applications will soon be the tools of choice, replacing traditional desktop applications.

Fred Wilson writes:

“…my experience and my bet is that wikis will take the enterprise by storm. Because they are simpler, easier, and better.”

Peter Rip predicts:

“The AJAX version of Office is coming. But the key isn’t AJAX. The key is the apps will naturally collaborate the way we have all learned to work - via the Web.”

“…I bet in five years more people use AJAX Office than Microsoft Office.”

We couldn’t agree more! And Gliffy fits right in there…