Microsoft Live Mesh open to all in the U.S…. and the world, with a tweak
Didn’t get a chance to get into the Microsoft Live Mesh technical preview? Let the floodgates open because Microsoft has made the service available to all in the United States. The service apparently determines your location eligibility based on your regional settings in XP or Vista. International folks can change their language settings to EN-US to try the service if they want.
While this is good news, I really can’t wait to see when support for Windows Mobile and Mac OS X arrives. Frankly the lack of WinMo support from day one is a little disappointing to me, but I realize that Microsoft likely wants to roll out a solid cloud-service rather than put something out that works on more devices, but doesn’t work as well. I’ll be adding this to my "must look at" list, just like I did with SugarSync and Dropbox. Any Live Mesh users have initial thoughts?
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I’ve been using Live Mesh since the start of the technical preview, and it has been the best file-syncing service that I have used.
All other services that I’ve tried have had problems of some sort when sharing my iTunes library. Live Mesh has been the only one that works well sharing my iTunes library and files without having files go missing, issues with duplicated .itl & .xml files, etc.
I can’t wait until the Live Mesh development platform is released at PDC this year so we can begin to see the birth of Live Mesh apps.
Mesh + Live Workspace + Sky Drive = decent cloud computing. Can’t wait (even though i expect it to take a long time)
From the Live Mesh blog:
“Our forum announcement from yesterday got a lot of people talking. We just updated the forum post to clarify exactly what’s going on, but I want to explain here as well. This week we did two things:
1. Doubled the maximum number of users we’ll allow to access the Live Mesh Technology Preview.
2. Simplified the Tech Preview sign-up process. We’ve removed the requirement to sign up via Microsoft Connect, so that instead you can sign up directly from http://www.mesh.com.”
So if you want in, you’d better hurry up and get an account, before they run out.
Cody, Live Mesh has a client install for the sync part… how is that cloud computing? ;) I’m completely joking of course. Referring to your thought that my installing browser extensions during my web-only challenge is really just installing other apps, so what’s the point.
I hear you… but I don’t want to get caught up in semantics or folks might miss the bigger picture here. With a bare-bones or truly mobile OS and the Firefox platform, I’m thinking you can have a light-weight environment that still provides plenty of functionality. Remember that these extensions take up far fewer device resources than their client counterparts most of the time. When I combine this theory with the growing netbook trend then I see the bigger picture. And I’m hoping that others do too! :)
1) >
Isn’t that redundant? I don’t mean to criticise; I’m just trying to figure out why using all 3 would be optimal. Without thinking about it too much, it seems like all 3 go about the same syncing/sharing issue, just in dif ways.
2) Is Live Mesh better than FolderShare? And if so, is it so much better that I should convince all the people I’m sharing with to switch?
Sorry I messed up the quoting of the previous comment above: Mesh + Live Workspace + Sky Drive = decent cloud computing.
Although I enjoy using Live Mesh over FolderShare, and I have been able to effective use Live Mesh with my iTunes library where FolderShare failed miserably, it is still a technical preview and I have experienced a few bugs from time-to-time. As such, I would not recommend using it at this point unless you are technical in nature and are equipped and patient to deal with problems that could arise. Having said that, I have not experienced any data loss and/or corruption, but have experienced some user interface bugs and periods of time where changes have not been synced.
In general, I would never recommend a beta and/or technical preview to be used by anyone, however I would recommend checking it out now with the goal of using it when the product has reached general release.
If you used Mesh to sync and browse all the files on all of “your” devices it would be helpful. It would also be nice to have storage you could hit from any device even if you didn’t own it (skydrive). I thought live workspace was there equivalent to Google Doc, but was wrong. If it was, wouldn’t it be nice to modify a document that was held on your WinMobile phone from your PC? Then that change gets pushed across all of your devices when they have net access, but yet have a local copy when the cloud isn’t available. The reason I like having a local copy is because I don’t always have access to the cloud (the only time partly cloudy is a bad thing). So if everything would stay in sync on all my devices, be modifiable from a browser, and have a space to share content to the world I would be a happy guy. MobileMe is closer than most other solutions from what I’ve seen. All it needs to do is be able to edit more content than email and contacts though.
Kevin, I wouldn’t mind having to install just one piece of software. For security reasons I wouldn’t want the internet to have an easy way to read and write files to my PC. I think it’s safer using a local client. I do think installing redundant client software is wasteful ;)
Thanks for the replies Cody and Rick. I’m thinking FolderShare has a lower barrier to entry than some of the other MS-owned solutions in that I don’t have to get people I’m sharing with to get a Live ID for sign on. GoogleDocs doesn’t make users get a gmail account. I think MS marketing needs to distinguish the various products/methods better.
BTW, FolderShare allows remote access from any computer to any of your computers that are on FolderShare as long as the host computer is connected to the internet.
I’m a fan of Ray Ozzie’s…looking forward to Live Mesh growing. Check this extreme use of FeedSync in a Jon Udell podcast: http://tinyurl.com/feedsyncdb and his interview of Ray.