Overheard: Live Mesh — your Briefcase in the cloud

To put it really simply: the promise of the Mesh is that you won’t have to care where you are or which device you’re using - your data will always be there. You’ll only have to care about which data you want to share with whom. Stan Schroeder, Live Mesh - The Version You Can Understand

I got my invitation for Live Mesh about two weeks ago. The toughest part was finding someone to play with — to share documents and other content with. Once I dug in, I realized “Hey, this is nothing new!” About ten years ago, there was a very handy web-based app called Briefcase that sort of did the same thing. It was much clunkier, but the idea was there.

Briefcase was a very valuable tool when I was training and moving from building to building. I could keep everything I need on the Web, get to a new building and download what I needed for a particular workshop. I could post all my bookmarks, PowerPoint presentations, handouts…whatever. I could make things in my briefcase public, keep them private or share them with specific users.

Sometimes lately, when I’m writing about new technology, I feel like I’m in some strange time warp. Everything new is just updated old.