Microsoft Live Labs has launched Seadragon.com, a site that allows you to share virtually any size image on the web. Microsoft's Seadragon technology aims to make browsing images, no matter how large, a speedy, seamless, and smooth experience. As of version 2, Silverlight includes a feature called Deep Zoom, which in essence is Seadragon converted for use across multiple browser and platforms. Seadragon.com is built entirely on top of Windows Azure, with the same Community Technology Preview that is available to the public.

There are three steps to using the service:

Find: the URL to an image on the web. Make sure it's to the image directly, not to a page that contains it. Paste: the URL into the textbox above and hit "Create" We'll need some time to prepare it if we haven't seen it before. Share: the resulting Seadragon experience with your friends, or embed the viewer directly into your own site.

For example, if you take this image of the Seattle skyline and hand it over to Seadragon, the site will give you this URL as well as a script that lets you embed the new image wherever you'd like:

As you can see, the embedded viewer adjusts dynamically to the layout of the page. However, it can also be customized to a specific size by simply changing the size numbers in the code. In short, no matter how big the image is, it can easily fit on your site. The beautiful part is that your readers don't need to have Silverlight installed. Seadragon.com will use Silverlight (smoother experience and better performance) if it's available, and otherwise will use an AJAX control if it isn't. Pretty nifty!