Live Mesh

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.

Overheard: Microsoft Live Mesh is JBOF (just a bunch of feeds)

Essentially, Live Mesh is a collection of feeds (which can be expressed as ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, RSS, WB-XML, or POX). Every piece of data entered into a user’s Mesh — be it a file, a folder, a message, a user permission, or a new device — is rendered as a piece of information in a feed. The feeds are then synced with other devices that are part of that Mesh following rules for how to sync each particular piece of information. Josh Catone, Live Mesh: First Look at Microsoft’s New Platform

Ok…I’m loving this. Social networking all grown up. News feeds are the future and Facebook showed us how to use them.

The Live Mesh Notifier is a news feed of all the activity on a user’s Mesh. Right now that means changes made to files, folders, devices, user permissions, and comments left on files/folders. However, because Live Mesh is a platform that seeks to interact with third party services…it is easy to envision how much more could be pushed through the news feed.