Microsoft Live Mesh Turns the Web Into Your File Sharing Hub
Microsoft believes in the cloud. The company has just unveiled an invite-only test of its new Live Mesh service, a “cloud computing” project designed to help you access and share your files from where ever you are.
Live Mesh synchronizes and shares data across multiple machines — currently that means Windows PCs, but look for Windows Mobile as well as Mac OS X support to be added later this year. Mesh offers one-click sharing for desktop folders, remote desktop connections, web-based file access and a news feed to keep track of it all. Eventually Microsoft would like to add Xbox, DVR and other devices to the list of syncing/sharing possibilities.
The project announcement was made by Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, who calls the web “the hub of our social mesh.” That’s quite a change for Microsoft and represents a significant step away from the desktop. Eventually Microsoft hopes, as Ozzie says, that “social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View.”
To interact with your files Live Mesh offers two separate interfaces: the desktop app and the web-based desktop. Regardless of which you’re using, you’ll be able to share, open and edit files via desktop applications just as you would with local files.
Live Mesh will be able to sync your data between PCs and can also share files between multiple users. However the sharing features are hampered by a lack of version control options. For now at least the sharing options are geared more toward the “send Mom some photos” notion of file sharing, rather than document collaboration.
From a technical standpoint Mesh is really just a collection of feeds (available as ATOM, JSON, RSS, and a few other formats) that the desktop and web apps can tap into. It’s one part remote desktop and one part online storage with basic syncing functions thrown in as well.
Live Mesh presents a different kind of platform lock-in than Microsoft’s usual strategy. Rather than tying Live Mesh directly to Windows, the lock-in is in the syncing process — the Mesh Framework that allows developers to tap into Live Mesh.
The ability for outside developers to tap in goes back to Ozzie’s belief that Live Mesh will be not just a file syncing service, but a centralized hub of all your activity, whether it’s social websites like Facebook or sharing Excel files with co-workers.
Live Mesh embraces a number of popular web 2.0 memes — there’s a Facebook-style news feed for your documents that lists recent changes made to files, folders, devices, and more. Perhaps more interesting is that the Live Mesh Notifier, as the new feed is called, includes API hooks, which means outside apps could tap into it. For instance, Facebook apps could push in photo updates or FriendFeed could push in your entire social network stream.
Live Mesh certainly looks like an interesting service. Unfortunately the initial 10,000 beta test spots are already filled so I haven’t been able to actually use Live Mesh. However, there are some obvious potential flaws, like the lack of version control for files. And it remains to be seen whether users are ready to merge the notion of web-based sharing with their more mundane work-related activities (do you really want to see Twitter updates in the same news tracker that tells you when a co-worker has finished editing your presentation?).
And of course Live Mesh is tied to the rest of Microsoft’s Live services, which, despite being useful in some cases, suffer from horribly confusing marketing-speak that’s liable to put off the average user.
Still, if Microsoft can do a better job of explaining what Live Mesh is, how it works and why users should care, it might actually have a winner on its hands.
For more info check out some of the videos available on Microsoft’s Channel 9 network (Silverlight required).
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