ComputerWorld has an interesting article titled 6 factors that will decide the fate of Silverlight. The 6 factors are: Microsoft's technology on the web, the enduring appeal of Flash development, wider cross platform support, interest beyond traditional developers, AJAX et al, and co-existence in the market.

The writer obviously did a lot of research in putting that article together, since he's got quotes from a number of top people, including Jesse Warden, a long time Flash developer, Greg deMichillie, an analyst from Directions on Microsoft, and Michael Cote from Redmonk.

Obviously Flex has the lead right now for RIA development. The article says that its "hugely popular", and Silverlight has "yet to take off". Jesse gives some quotes about Flash and Flex development, saying "there is more money in it", and that most of the work for Silverlight "is because the company is a Microsoft partner."

I was doing some research the other day to try and find out how many people have Silverlight installed on their machines, and came across this great blog post that describes how to setup your own custom variable in Google Analytics to track how many of your visitors have Silverlight installed.

By the way, the only information I found on the number of installs was data from Microsoft that indicated they had 1.5 million downloads of Silverlight per day. Note that the number of installs is always lower than the number of downloads, and there's no indication if its attempted downloads or successful downloads.

For comparison, Flash Player has about 12 million per day.

Microsoft is set to launch a new version of the MSN Toolbar later today, which is powered by Silverlight. As with Adobe, Microsoft is using Silverlight in their own software - with the Toolbar being the first public use (that I'm aware of).

The toolbar requires Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is only available on Windows.

The install process is not for the faint of heart. The toolbar install page lists the following 9 steps to download the beta of the toolbar:

1. Before you can install and use Toolbar Beta, you must install Microsoft Silverlight and enroll in the Toolbar Beta program.
2. If you haven't already done so, on the MSN Toolbar Beta Download website, click Get Microsoft Silverlight, and then follow the on-screen instructions to install Microsoft Silverlight.
3. Sign in to the Microsoft Connect website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
4. In the left pane, click Available Connections.
5. Next to MSN Toolbar Beta, click Apply.
6. Click Continue.
7. Register with Microsoft Connect, if you haven't already done so. When your application to join the MSN Toolbar Beta program is accepted, you'll receive a notification e-mail.
8. On the Microsoft Connect website, in the left pane, under MSN Toolbar Beta, click Downloads.
9. In the list of download packages, click MSN Toolbar Beta Install, and then follow the on-screen instructions to install Toolbar Beta.

It would have been much easier for them to push the software out using Silverlight, as Adobe has done with the AIR applications on the AIR marketplace.

According to Mary Jo Foley, who writes the Microsoft blog for ZDNet, Microsoft will be releasing Silverlight to Windows Update this week, as well as its Windows Server Update Services (for enterprise customers). In both cases the Silverlight installation will be optional - users will have to select it in order to install it, which makes mass distribution fairly unlikely for now.

If you've tried Silverlight and have had problems with content saying you don't have the plugin install, Mary Jo writes that its caused by having Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1 installed. Removing the Silverlight 1.1 plugin and re-installing Silverlight 1.0 seems to solve that problem.

The big news out of CES for RIA watchers is the news that Microsoft Silverlight will be used, at least in part, on the website for the 2008 Olympics to be held later this year in Beijing. NBC Universal, who owns the sole rights to the Olympics in the US, will team up with Microsoft and deliver enhanced video for the Beijing Olympics using the Silverlight platform.

The press release doesn't answer many questions that people have about this - namely what portion of the site will be based on Silverlight. This is a smart move for Microsoft, but likely won't have much effect on the distribution of the Silverlight plugin. For the last summer Olympics in Athens, NBCOlympics.com had only 13 million unique visitors for the entire event. In comparison, Adobe Flash Player is installed about 8 million times per day. If those numbers stay the same, Adobe will install more versions of the Flash Player a full week (7 days) before any track and field medals are given out.

More commentary is available online at Ryan Stewart's blog, TechCrunch, and Beet.tv.

Microsoft is testing a new Silverlight version of its product download center, likely in an attempt to gauge customer reaction to installing the Silverlight runtime in order to download software. When some visitors head to the existing product download center, they are prompted to participate in a limited test of the new site. Clicking accept on the dialog brings them to a page prompting them to install Silverlight.

Once that step is complete, users are sent to the new product download center.

The new product download center does not appear to contain any substantial benefit over the current version. There are some mouseover effects on the downloads which provide users with a bit more information, but clicking on any of the links takes you to the same HTML page as with the existing site.

The new Microsoft Download Center powered by Silverlight is available online at preview.microsoft.com/downloads.

Microsoft released Silverlight 1.0 today, announced plans to work with Novell to bring Silverlight support to Linux. They have some customer showcase sites, like the Home Shopping Network and the World Wrestling Entertainment group, though these two sites are not RIAs, they're only using the Silverlight plugin to stream video.

Beet.tv has more information, including an interview with Brian Goldfarb, head of development for Silverlight. Ironically, that video is posted in Flash video format.

Ryan Stewart has a great post breaking down the search engine optimization for Silverlight. Many people still don't realize how search engine friendly Flash is - Google indexes SWF files without any problem. As well, many developers have created applications that allow you to deep link into Flex applications, by changing the URL bar as the application changes. Yahoo Maps is a great example, and there are others.

While Google can index SWF files without too many problems, it will only index the static content that is in the file. If your application goes back to the database to retrieve information, that content won't be indexed by Google. In essence, Google doesn't know how to crawl the SWF file, as it can for dynamic web pages. This is one of the limitations that Flex applications currently have, though some clever developers have developed solutions for it and Google is likely working on it.

TechCrunch had a story the other day about a new start up called CoRank that allows you to setup your own Digg like website for any specific topic. I have set one up for rich Internet applications, and its online at ria.corank.com. The site allows anyone to submit stories that are then voted on and promoted to the front page. There are bookmarklets available for every major browser that allow you to easily add a story to the site, as well as links for blogs and websites.

Check it out and participate if you'd like to help highlight the great stories and examples of rich Internet applications that are out there.

Microsoft provided more details on Silverlight yesterday at its Mix07 conference. TechCrunch has a good overview of all the announcements, with some excellent comments from readers as well. (In particular I liked the fact that people were pointing out that support Mac OS X and Windows doesn't necessarily make you completely cross platform.) Ryan Stewart has some more information as well, including some cool demos of the technology.

Of all the announcements yesterday, the one that most caught my eye was what they call Silverlight Streaming. Microsoft is giving 4 GB of space to host Silverlight content, likely videos, and stream 1 million minutes of it free. This is interesting because its the start of Microsoft starting to integrate their Windows Live platform and the tools that they make available to developers. This could be a key differentiator, as Adobe doesn't currently have anything like this. (Adobe does partner with companies for its Flash Video Streaming Service, but no one offers this for free.) Microsoft will obviously try and leverage their growing live.com services along with their ad network to entice developers to this platform.

One of the questions that developers continue to ask is how do I make money with these new rich Internet applications? Its easy to add a few lines of JavaScript to a webpage to embed a Google advertisement: its much harder to embed an advertisement into an application or streaming video. If Microsoft can solve that problem, developers will be interested.