Judging from the tentative language used by Keith Morrow, it is hard to pinpoint when (or even if) Blockbuster will release any consumer products based on Live Mesh. However, Live Mesh is clearly on the radar of a lot of corporate IT departments and hopefully we will see some 'real' products very soon.

Mac users can now sign in to Live Mesh, go to 'Add Device,' and click the "limited Mac Tech Preview now available link." However, it looks like Microsoft is only releasing this as a limited beta so far and will only allow a limited (and unspecified) number of Mac clients to connect to Live Mesh at first.

Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 users in the US and the UK can now also download a Live Mesh client (US residents, UK residents).

Other Updates

Overall, most of the updates to Live Mesh are evolutionary, though Microsoft has made some important improvements to the user interface, such as having the Live Mesh bar remember its previous state and adding a 'superpan' feature to improve support for large monitors during remote sessions. Enterprise users can now also choose to enable authentication for Remote Desktop sessions, or disable this functionality altogether.

If you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you can now also drag and drop files to and from your browser.

You can find a more detailed list of new and improved features on the Live Mesh blog.

LiveSide has just discovered this page on Microsoft's Live Mesh site, which reveals that the Mac version is now ready for download. It reads:

An early look at Live Mesh for Mac

The Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world by connecting your devices over the internet - and now, you can add your Mac to your Live Mesh! It's never been easier to synchronize all your important Microsoft Office documents, media files, and pictures between your computers or between friends.

Since the launch of Live Mesh, many people have been asking for a Live Mesh extender for the Mac and while it's still under development, here is an early preview of our Mac extender. With the Live Mesh Mac extender, you can

• Add your Mac to your Live Mesh - it will appear with your other devices on www.mesh.com and throughout the Live Mesh UI.
• Synchronize files between your Mac, your other computers, and your Live Desktop.
• Synchronize folder contents between your Mac and other folder members.
• Easily access Live Mesh news, your Live Desktop, and manage your devices from the Live Mesh menu bar item.
• Receive notifications through Live Mesh when updates are available and easily update the Live Mesh extender for Mac.

A word of caution!
Please keep in mind that the Live Mesh extender for Mac is still under development, and due to overwhelming enthusiasm, we're making it available earlier than usual. Like many software projects, we started our Mac development efforts with the basic technology and scenarios. We started by making our synchronization engine and operating environment work on the Mac and starting to sync file between computers and members.

Over the next few months, we'll be working on updating the user experience and improving the Live Mesh experience and functionality, performance, and stability on the Mac. As such, please use at your own risk and remember to send us feedback.

What It Looks Like

The Mac version running on OS X, integrates Mesh into the Finder, with a Mesh sidebar next to the folder view. Like in the Windows version, you can share Meshified items with other users from this bar.Also like the Windows version, you can customize the settings to specify which items are synchronized with which devices. Here's what Mesh on Mac looks like:

Image Courtesy of LiveSide

Allowing users to bypass the Live Mesh online storage by directly copying files from one machine to another is a major enhancement to Live Mesh. 5GB are not a very large amount of storage anymore, especially if you want to share videos or photos. Bypassing the Live Desktop of course means that those files are not available online from anywhere anymore, but for a lot of usage scenarios (backup, syncing between desktop and laptop etc.), the online storage wasn't really necessary anyway. Still, it would be nice to see Microsoft up the 5GB limit, or allow users to purchase more space.

Strangely, users will have to turn of syncing to the Live Desktop on the Live Desktop itself. It is not possible to directly configure a folder to bypass the Live Desktop from the desktop, which might have some technical reasons, but mostly seems like an unnecessary hassle.

The new version of Live Mesh will also allow users to manage potential file conflicts on the Live Desktop, something that was sorely missing before.

Going Mobile

Microsoft also quietly released a mobile version of Live Mesh, which allows users to access their files from their mobile phones or any other Internet connected device through an optimized site. While it works best on Windows Mobile phones, we have tested it out on the iPhone as well, and found that it worked surprisingly well. The iPhone displays all photos and documents, though it doesn't play back mp3 files. The site feel a bit better integrated on a Windows Mobile device (you can upload files to Mesh from the phone, for example), but it works well on other mobile platforms as well.

This is not, however, the promised mobile client for Live Mesh - it is only a way to access your files more conveniently from a mobile device. The mobile client is still 'coming soon.'

Going Mac Soon?

As if all of these updates weren't enough, the enterprising folks over at the Live Side blog today found a Mac version of the Mesh client on Microsoft's servers (though Microsoft promptly took it down). While this wasn't an official release, it is clear that Microsoft is taking the Mac platform seriously in its Mesh strategy and chances are that we will see an official Mac client in the near future.

Lots of Developments

Microsoft is putting a lot of resources behind its Live Mesh platform. It's good to see that the company is releasing so many updates and upgrades in such a short time. The syncing application is only the beginning of what Microsoft could do with Mesh and they surely have greater plans for it than just making it a glorified syncing app, of which Microsoft already has a few anyway.

]]>Discuss]]>

Gmail Tries to Be Less Creepy, Fails

Gmail, Google's powerful web based email service, announced some changes to its contact management features this week. Contact management has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders - the company does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them in to some other applications without anyone's permission. This week's new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation even less clear than it was before.

See also: Google Gears Coming to Gmail and Google Calendar Soon

iPhone: The New Personal Computer

When Apple first announced the launch of its iPhone platform, we wrote here that it is a game changer. Even the core of iPhone is a major advance in mobile computing, but with the platform iPhone becomes the new personal computer. The desktop from now on will be for professional and business work. Laptops aren't going away, but will get increasingly less personal use. The reason is that iPhone with its application platform is a better personal computer and it's widely accessible.

See also: RWW Predictions: iPhone Sales in 2008

Apple's App Store: 10 Million Downloads Later

Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch has been growing quickly since last weekend. As at Monday, close to 250 applications had been added. As Medialets reports, at the same time, the average price of those applications has dropped. Interestingly, free applications are getting higher average ratings from their users than paid apps.

See also: iPhone Apps For Social Networks and News Apps for the iPhone: NYTimes, AP, Bloomberg

Live Mesh Now Open to All of U.S.

Windows Live Mesh is Microsoft's software+services data synchronization platform. Because of its complex nature, most people assume that file synchronization is all there is to Live Mesh, but in reality, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft has big plans for the service and syncing files between computers and the cloud is just the start. When Live Mesh launched, it was currently a closed "technical preview" (that's Microsoft for "beta"). But now it appears that the Live Mesh guys have quietly opened up the platform for all of the U.S.

gPhone? Just a Rumor - The Real Story Is The Android Developer Revolt

Of course, we all know that the event of the past week (or perhaps we should say the event of the year, given the news coverage), has been the launch of the iPhone 2.0. Yet even amidst the iPhone news frenzy - the lines at the stores, the activations, the failures, the apps! - there was another phone getting some press too - the Google Phone. The rumor was that Google was going to build its own phone after all. Yet while that rumor was catching the headlines, the real story was taking place within the developer community itself.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited

When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing. Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future. And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users. You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered, but injected into a massive social network. While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced (read on for the details).

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world - being social is becoming an important full time job. "Community Manager" is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang's growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.

See also: Do Facebook Users Care About Commenting On Mini-Feeds?

Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?

Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June this week and two things were striking about the data. Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser's address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation. Also check out the great discussion on this in the comments - we may have been convinced that this isn't such a bad thing after all.

See also: Google Getting Close to 70% of U.S. Search Market

The Story of the Fail Whale

How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community

Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.

See also: Cartoon: Twitter Dating

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Live

This week we did our fourth RWW Live podcast, which we're running fortnightly on the TalkShoe platform. RWW Live is where a group of the ReadWriteWeb Network writers and editors get together to discuss the latest in web technology.

This week we devoted the whole episode to the iPhone. Participants were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O'Hear from our network blog last100, RWW founder and editor Richard MacManus, RWW Feature Writer Bernard Lunn and RWW Lead Writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, who joined about halfway through. You can listen to the podcast below (email readers click through).

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Netflix Comes To Xbox

Earlier this week, Netflix subscribers got a nice surprise - they no longer need to save up for that Roku box to get instant access to Netflix movies on their TV. Instead, the new set-top box for Netflix is going to be one that many people already have in their living rooms: an Xbox 360. The partnership between Xbox and Netflix will be bringing a new "Watch Instantly" feature that will appear on Xbox later this fall. In addition, a "Live Party" feature will allow people to watch movies together over Xbox Live. Well, the coolness of that feature is debatable...but still, Netflix on Xbox? Did Microsoft just win the living room from Apple?

Deep Zoom Changes the Web

Bah humbug - another browser plugin. Is that what you think? Well, like it or not the Silverlight plugin is being pushed hard. It's going to be installed on millions of HP computers and it's going to power NBC's Olympics '08 website, so it's going to become hard to avoid installing this one after a while.

If you've been paying attention to Silverlight news, you know that one of the most remarkable things about it is its Deep Zoom feature. It's definitely the coolest. It initially received attention when Hard Rock debuted their Memorabilia website. Then there was the incredible Deep Earth site (which technically didn't use Silverlight's Deep Zoom, but instead uses Silverlight plus a custom-written component created in Visual Studio). Now we have a Silverlight Deep Zoomable image of Yosemite National Park. 70 photographers, GPS-enabled cameras, 10,000 high-res photos. The results let researchers study rockfall activity and help Yosemite search-and-rescue teams with their operations by providing detailed, zoomable maps of the rockfaces. Cool? Yes, definitely.

Live Mesh

This service is rapidly approaching coolness. Mac fans have complained there's no Mesh for them, but that's only a matter of time. In the past couple of days, we've seen Live Mesh open up to all and launch a mobile web site.

Via m.mesh.com you can see your stream of Mesh news, access your Meshified folders, and move your photos, videos, and other content from your mobile device into your Mesh, instantly making them accessible from any computer, anywhere. The Live Desktop (cloud storage) offers 5 GB, but you aren't limited to meshing only 5 GB - you can mesh as much as you want. Data will sync from device to device via P2P connections, but only 5 GB are stored online for access when you're away from a device you own. You have the option to configure which files are part of that 5 GBs. Oh, and it does Remote Desktop, too.

If you haven't been able to wrap your head around Mesh, yet, this video is a killer introduction. Here, Ori Amiga demos the native Mesh feeds, WPF applications using Mesh, a Silverlight client that supports working on and offline, a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh, and even a Mac client that sends photos to Live Mesh. Cool? You bet.

Ori Amiga: Programming the Mesh

Your guide to this video

• 10:53: Skip to this point to start seeing the best stuff
• 19:10(ish): The developer stuff continues until 19:10ish
• 19:40: WPF demo app Family Show
• 27:01: Silverlight App PhotoZoom running offline
• 33:08: Mesh connector for Twitter
• 34:35: Mesh connector for Facebook
• 36:45: Mesh running on the Mac - photo from Photobooth synced to Mesh almost instantaneously - to both PCs and mobile!
• 43:00: Opening/editing files directly from the cloud - the cloud will be a shortcut on your desktop
• 46:09: Viewing offline RSS feeds synced to Mesh in your RSS reader

Do these innovations change your opinion of Microsoft? Are you impressed, annoyed, neutral, upset, undecided? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Author Disclosure: I also blog for Microsoft's Channel 10. I'm not a Microsoft employee, just a technology fan. This is not a paid endorsement - these are personal opinions.

LiveSide reported last night that folks were able to sign up for Mesh if they were in the U.S. and this morning, they confirmed this to be the case.

The official announcement was made in the Live Mesh Forum. It read:

Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!

International Customers

With Live Mesh open to anyone in the US, our international friends can join in the fun early as well - with one caveat: you must be willing to change your Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US. Once you do this you will be able to immediately sign in to Live Mesh with a valid Windows Live ID. Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems.

Feedback

Once you've begun using Live Mesh, we'd love to hear from you! We are working hard to create the best experience and appreciate any feedback you have. Please send us feedback using our online form. You can also submit (and view others') feedback and bugs here on the Microsoft Connect website.

Thank you,
The Live Mesh team

About Live Mesh

For those of you unfamiliar with the service, one of the main things you need to know is that at the moment, the service is Windows-only. However, Microsoft has confirmed in the past that a Mac client is in the works. Eventually it will work with mobile devices, too. Certainly those will include Windows Mobile, but also any other devices that permit it to run. They should have some takers, though, because Mesh isn't built with proprietary code, but rather with open protocols that most web developers are familiar with, including HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON. Although Mesh's FeedSync is new, it is an XML protocol based on ATOM and RSS.

With Mesh running on your computers, you can simply right-click any folder and choose "Add to Mesh." By doing so, that folder and all the files it contains are synchronized with all of your other computers you've added to your personal Mesh. It also syncs those files to the Live Mesh Desktop, which is Mesh's "cloud" - an online web site you can access from any computer. At the moment, the online storage is limited to 5 GB, but that could change in the future. However, Mesh's recent update allows you to set folders to sync via peer-to-peer, bypassing Live Desktop.

A Live Mesh Folder

When folders are Mesh-enabled, a small panel appears to the right of the folder in explorer which catalogs any changes to the folder (file adds/moves/deletions) as well as notes and comments left by any of the folder's members.

Some people have compared Mesh to Apple's Mobile Me (I discussed this on my personal site not too long ago), but that's a little bit off the mark. Where Mobile Me is a consumer-focused product that offers sync and cloud storage, too - the difference is that Mesh is actually a platform. A service like Mobile Me could be built on Mesh, for example, so what you're seeing today with the file sync is sort of like a demo app of what the Mesh platform can do. However, that being said, we hope to see Mesh doing more than file sync in the future.

You can read our initial review of the service here

One of the players, SugarSync (RWW review here), today announced a development that further blurs the lines between synchronisation and collaboration services. With SugarSync's new functionality users can send any file from their desktop, web or mobile SugarSync application, regardless of the size of the file or number of recipients.

Once recipients have started downloading the files, the sender receives a notification advising them of the fact. SugarSync also time limits the email to 1 day to further enhance security.

Why this changes the synchronisation game

Previously synchronisation services were primarily about multiple device access and backup. LiveMesh has promised collaboration but this has been Windows-centric. SugarSync solution is cross-platform and as such heralds something of a game-change.

SugarSync in action

I've been using SugarSync for around six months now to back-up and sync files between multiple machines and the web. My experience has been exactly what one would hope for with a service like this - seamless and silent. SugarSync works in the background and keeps everything beautifully up to date. Every now and then I find myself taking a peek to make sure that the product has done what it's meant to and, as yet, I haven't been let down.

The changes rolled out today give SugarSync a point of difference over some of the other sync providers, while taking a large step into the domain of the collaboration solution providers.

A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world

Web Apps

The Favorite Web Apps of RWW Readers

A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web apps that got at least one mention: 161. No doubt some of those were left by the developers themselves, but many were left by seemingly passionate users. The most popular were the usual suspects: Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Reader. See our post for the full list.

BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

Related:

• How Best to Submit Our (Or Any) Stories to Digg
• The Decline and Fall of Quality on Digg
• Mixx Launches Innovative API - Continues to Challenge the Digg Experience
• Yahoo! Tries to Spread Buzz, Adds Widgets, RSS

Facebook Hacked Again

A report on BBC's technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users' privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user's knowledge.

Related:

• Report: In Emergencies, People Turn to Facebook

Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs

Adobe announced this week the "Open Screen Project", which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.

YouTube Aims to Monetize in a Post-TV Era

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made big promises of mysterious, highly-interactive new methods of monetizing YouTube in a CNBC interview this week. "We believe the best products are coming out this year," he said. "And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying."

As all established media (not just newspapers) face a growing challenge from the internet, with its on-demand, highly personalized and infinitely interactive social connections - can TV, and TV on the internet, learn keep up with the times?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Dancing With Gorillas: The New Web Era

This week we ran an intriguing 3-part series, by Bernard Lunn, on the new Web. Part 1 was The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition, Part 2 was The Emerging Main Street Web. Part 3, Dancing With Gorillas, is highlighted here -- but do read the whole series!

The new Web era is about the mainstream. This is when millions of small businesses and digital free agents make a good living by providing better products to a much more savvy market. This is the point in the Crossing the Chasm model when all the innovation stops, start-ups get consolidated into a few mega players and it all gets a bit boring until the next wave of innovation hits us.

Nevermind The Recession, The Web Will Change The World!

Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web:

a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current 'web 2.0' era of innovation in web technology?;
b) Why aren't we (meaning startups) tackling the "big, hard problems" with web technologies?

In this post we explore those questions. See also Sarah Perez's post entitled Wanted: 5 Startups To Change the World, in which she commented on Umair Haque's open challenge to Silicon Valley: find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and he will help you do it.

Interview: How Will Live Mesh Integrate With Windows Live?

One of the highlights last week at Web 2.0 Expo was the launch of Microsoft's new cloud computing play, Live Mesh. Mesh is a new development platform for syncing user data between the desktop and the Web, and across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but it'll support mobile, Mac computers and other devices in the future). It can sync data for single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. Currently Live Mesh is in "technology preview", so it is not a finished product. Even so, we couldn't help but notice the overlap between Live Mesh and a number of Windows Live products.

To find out more about how Live Mesh will integrate with Windows Live, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed Microsoft's Brian Hall - GM of Development for the Windows Live Platform.

An Ode to RSS, On RSS Awareness Day

There's just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let's pile another one on. We'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

Related:

• Can Web Apps Get Too Drunk on Aggregation?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

AltSearchEngines Update

By ASE Editor Charles Knight:

This past week at AltSearchEngines was a very rich one for the quality and quantity of our Guest Authors. On Sunday, Erick Schonfeld wrote a post entitled Is keyword search about to hit it's breaking point? On Tuesday, Stephen Arnold conducted an interview with Exalead's François Bourdoncle. Wednesday Nitin Karandikar reviewed the recent Alternative Search Engines Day, and Kaila Colbin from Search Insider wrote the intriguing "We're not a Google-killer" is the new Google-killer! Then we had a second interview when Susanne Koch of Pandia interviewed Venky Harinarayan, the co-founder of Kosmix. And finally Paul Heymann asked, "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" We were very fortunate to have such a distinguished group of guest writers, and I hope you'll have time to read some of their posts.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Where is Windows Live at?

We last spoke to Hall in June '07 when the second generation of Windows Live launched. At that point there was a lot of confusion about the Windows Live brand - we noted that it was "still a fragmented vision, with a few too many products". So I started off by asking Brian for an update on Windows Live and what the brand means nowadays. He explained that Windows Live is about people sharing and getting to "their stuff". There are 3 parts to Windows Live, said Brian:

• Hosted services
• Peer to Peer
• Platform

Among the 'hosted services' layer there are products such as SkyDrive, which went beta last June. They also have Foldershare, a product that Microsoft acquired in 2005 that does P2P and remote tunneling for files.

Differences between Windows Live and Live Mesh

My next question was: how is the Live Mesh platform different to Windows Live? And where will the points of integration be? Hall said that Mesh is "a ground-up platform approach", whereby apps and community are programatically integrated into other apps. So in the longer run, Microsoft plans to integrate the 3 Windows Live layers (hosted, P2P, platform) into one seamless experience, using the Mesh platform.

It still is a little confusing, but Brian Hall is the first to recognize that they have a lot of work to do. He told me that the current Live Mesh UI is a "proof of concept" at this point, but over time aspects of it will be integrated into Windows Live.

Live Mesh concept illustration; source: Microsoft

So over time, we will see Live Mesh become integrated into Windows Live products. Brian Hall said it's unclear yet how that will play out, but for example we can expect SkyDrive (Microsoft's online storage product) to utilize Live Mesh technology to enable better syncing across desktop and Web, and among different devices. Also the sharing features of Live Mesh will become integrated into various Windows Live products.

The gist of the conversation was that Live Mesh is a platform and so in future we will see Windows Live products utilize that platform for syncing and sharing.

What's next for Windows Live?

As for Windows Live development, which Brian Hall is in charge of, he told us that we can expect to see new beta products in late summer / early fall. He also said that Microsoft is working on partnerships with social networks. At the end of March Microsoft announced the Windows Live Contacts API, enabling users to import and export their contacts and relationships from Windows Live to five popular social networks: Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged. Microsoft also introduced a new website, www.invite2messenger.net, where people can invite their contacts from any of those five social networks to join them on Windows Live Messenger. We can expect more of that kind of data sharing functionality to emerge.

We can also expect to see further integration of Windows Live features into the MSN line of products - for example making user and community content more a part of the MSN news portal, via RSS, online video, social networking, and more. Hall used the word "intermingling" to describe how Windows Live products will integrate with MSN. The broad plan here seems to be to continue the MSN brand, but make it more personalized and social using Windows Live functionality. I would compare this to how the Yahoo homepage is evolving to become more like MyYahoo. Indeed, if Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft then Mesh technology merged with Yahoo content properties will be an exciting prospect!

Conclusion

Overall, there is still brand confusion in all of this - Live Mesh, Windows Live, MSN. But Microsoft is definitely tackling the Web in a big way, and the sync and sharing platform of Mesh is a key move by Microsoft to hook their desktop and Windows software advantage into the Web world.

Please tell us your thoughts on Mesh and Windows Live in the comments.

Sponsor:

Web Apps

Live Mesh: First Look at Microsoft's New Platform

The new Live Mesh service that just launched as an invite only "technology preview" is Microsoft's attempt to tie all of our data together. Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud. It can sync data across devices used by a single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. On the surface, Mesh is a lot like competing file sync services such as Dropbox, SugarSync (which we covered in January), and even Microsoft's own FolderShare product. But what sets Live Mesh apart is its platform approach.

See also: Ray Ozzie Memo Explains Live Mesh Strategy; Full Text of Ray Ozzie Mesh Memo

Yahoo! to Rewire for Social Graph and Data Portability

Yahoo! announced at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup.

Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed at Expo. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. In this post we present a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.

Social Tools for the Office Worker: How to Subvert I.T. and Play at Work

We can't all eat, breathe, and live social media 24x7, as much as we might like to. Some of have day jobs that require a bit of our attention, too. And unlike the web-app embracing startups we read about, the policies at more traditional companies actually discourage mindless web surfing, tweeting, facebooking, and the like. However, there are still plenty of ways to fit in your social media addictions at work, without getting noticed by your nosy co-workers or getting blocked by I.T.

MySpace Apps Are Go For All Users

MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users this week after launching it in public beta last March. In that time over 1,000 applications have been approved and added to the gallery and there have been over 2.1 million application installs across the site. MySpace began promoting applications to users by adding an icon for the gallery on MySpace.com and a link on user control panels.

See also: When Will Facebook Be Ready for Business?; Start Pages: The Next Social Networks; Study: Social Networks Mirroring Reality TV

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013

A new report released by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

See also: IBM Wants a Piece of Web 2.0 Pie

Web 3.0 Through The Ages

So we're only half a decade at most into the Web 2.0 era, and we still don't really know what "Web 2.0" is. Yet for some reason, over the past couple of years there has been an even more confusing meme that seems to keep cropping up: "Web 3.0." It already feels like we've been talking about Web 3.0 for ages, even though we don't know yet know exactly what Web 2.0 is. What are the various ways that Web 3.0 has been defined over the past three years, and why is it helpful to talk about what the next web will look like?

See also: There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web; Tim O'Reilly: Tackle Big, Hard Problems With Web 2.0

So You're Launching a Platform: After Ubiquitous APIs - What's the Next Frontier?

We're here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and are getting inundated with press releases about new APIs and developer platforms, many from companies we've never even heard of in the first place. How long ago was it that the forward-looking thinkers argued that APIs and platforms would soon be available everywhere?

That time is clearly fast approaching and it makes us wonder: now that this matter is settled, what comes next? We asked a variety of people here and around the web what they thought will define the next frontier, what will build on the emerging foundation of ubiquitous APIs. We got some interesting answers.

Faster - Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant's death and Om Malik's heart attack as examples, Matt Richel built a case for web journalism as the cause of certain health woes because of its non-stop, 24/7 real-time nature. There is no doubt that news blogging is stressful. But it is not just blogging. Real-time anything is stressful. Take TV news, is Anderson Cooper not stressed? Looking broader, what about air traffic controllers or traders on Wall Street? Any human being that has to make decisions in real-time will be under a lot of stress.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Special: ReadWriteWeb Turns 5

On 20 April, 2003, ReadWriteWeb was born. My first post here was appropriately entitled The Read/Write Web and it began: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it." At the time I started ReadWriteWeb, web 2.0 hadn't yet been invented, Google Adsense hadn't launched (it would do so in June '03), Internet Explorer had 94% of the browser market share (followed by Netscape with 2%), the top blogs of the day according to Technorati were Slashdot (listed as number 1) and Where is Raed ? (a weblog from Baghdad; it closed in 2004). And 5 years ago, there was no money in blogging.

Today the blogging landscape is vastly different. The top blogs now are full-on media businesses. ReadWriteWeb, which started out 5 years ago as an evening hobby for me, has evolved with the times and is now the 11th ranked blog on Technorati's Top 100 - closing in on #10 Daily Kos! [Update: by the end of the week we'd got to #10!!] The reason we have continued to grow is because ReadWriteWeb is no longer just me. We have a great team of smart, web-savvy and passionate bloggers: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh Catone, Sarah Perez, Alex Iskold, Bernard Lunn, Emre Sokullu, and many other occasional and guest writers. ReadWriteWeb nowadays is also a network: last100 (Steve O'Hear and Daniel Langendorf), AltSearchEngines (Charles Knight) and ReadWriteTalk (Sean Ammirati).

Special: Alternative Search Engines Day

This week, before Web 2.0 Expo, our network blog AltSearchEngines held the first ever Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco. It started out with a keynote talk by ASE editor Charles Knight, who noted that alternative search engines only have about 1.7% market share combined. He thinks this is too small, so he wants all of the "alts" - you can see a list of them on our subsite The Search Race - to band together to make a bigger impact on the search market.

The overarching theme to AltSearchEngines Day was to encourage the alts to band together and help each other reach the mainstream audience. Anyone who regularly reads AltSearchEngines will know that there is a ton of innovation in search, literally hundreds of niche and vertical search startups. So this effort to join together to compete with (or complement) the likes of Google and Microsoft is very commendable - and as I mentioned in the opening panel, ReadWriteWeb heartily supports it.

Special thanks to Charles Knight for the vision and pulling this day together, and also LA Lassek and the SeeqPod team for organizing the event. Thanks as well to the sponsors of this event: SeeqPod, UpTake, HealthPricer, MatchPoint, GoPubMed, BlogDimension. Charles is "the voice of alternative search engines" in this industry. He is galvinising and leading the alts forward as a group, so be sure to subscribe to AltSearchEngines to track this initiative.

Last100 News

From our network blog about the digital lifestyle, last100. In Internet TV news, Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate announced a joint venture to create a new premium TV channel and VOD service, to be rolled out in the fall of 2009. The project will include a strong online component.

In digital music news, Sony BMG has became the second major label to sign up to Nokia’s ‘Comes With Music’ service, whereby customers who buy a supported handset will get a year of unlimited access to “millions of tracks”. When Nokia first unveiled its all-you-can-eat music offering last December, Universal Music was the sole partner, a natural fit considering that the label has been busy touting its own flat-rate plan known as Total Music. However, the two remaining majors, EMI and Times Warner, have yet to commit to Nokia’s scheme.

Read more: last100 Weekly wrapup, 21-25 April 2008

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Services Strategy Over the past decade our lives, our businesses, and our society have been transformed by the web.

In its early days the web grew through the explosion of information portals as gateways to content, marketplaces for commerce, and communications tools such as email, IM and newsgroups that drove a sense of community on the internet. Over time, the significance of these “3 Cs” – content, commerce, and community – has expanded tremendously, growing in ways through which they‟ve become intermixed and mutually reinforcing.

Content has changed at both the “head” and the “tail”. The line between editorialized portals and blogs has blurred, and all are consumed through feeds. Beyond news, movies and music and television have all expanded to embrace the web. And the interrelation of content and community has created a world of “social media”, where both head and tail content is intrinsically social by virtue of community linking, tagging, and ranking. Relationships and collective behavioral intelligence have changed how we stay informed, find and share media, and interact with one another.

Commerce on the web has moved well beyond the early online shopping cart. Nowadays, community is impacting commerce in dramatic ways. Head retailers such as Amazon utilize community extensively for recommendations, reviews, and wish lists. Tail commerce websites such as Craigslist utilize community extensively for conversation around local products. And Search has completely transformed online commerce. It‟s an essential utility for how we research, how we shop, and how we buy on the web. It‟s also become an essential mechanism for how we market on the web, and increasingly for how we sell on the web. Community on the web once meant “group communications”, largely through rudimentary tools such as email, IM and IRC, message boards and newsgroups. Today, the action has shifted toward using composite communications tools and platforms that mash together content, applications and commerce, all within the context of group interaction. These social platforms are altering the way we connect and coordinate, establish identity and affinities, and build reputation. While this notion of composite communications is most prominently demonstrated in how we use profile-centric consumer social networking tools, such as Facebook, the social platform is also finding its way into the workplace in the form of increasingly rich workspaces, both real-time and asynchronous, that integrate communications and content relevant to a project or a team.

As the “3 Cs” have evolved, so has the significance of online advertising as the economic engine powering our world of services. With growth projected from $40B today to $80B in the next three years, online advertising will continue to be the primary monetization mechanism for consumer services on the web. As advertising transitions more and more to being digital, measurable, and competitively bid, the “ad platform” is key. The advertising ecosystem surrounding this platform is reliant upon the continuous innovation of publishers and developers, whose interesting and engaging properties capture users‟ time and attention and ultimately serve to match advertisers with a relevant audience. Continuous innovation in such high-engagement products and services, in each area of the “3 Cs”, will continue to provide the fuel to drive the advertising-based economic model. Given this context, it‟s strategic that we invest broadly in solutions and partnerships that advance our position in current and future generations of content, community, commerce, and search, and also in an advertising platform that‟s attractive to advertisers, publishers and developers.

But while innovation in the “3 Cs”, search and ads is essential for success in services targeting consumers on the web, their impact barely scratches the surface of the much broader effect that internet services innovation will have on individuals, businesses, and developers.

Indeed Microsoft‟s overall services strategy encompasses all of these areas: services for the individual, services for business, and services for developers. The intent of this memo is to map out that all-up strategy. I‟ll outline three principles that guide our work, and describe how those principles are woven into our myriad software and services offerings.

Central to this strategy is our embrace of both a world of the web and a world of devices. Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences – experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.

It is our mission in this new era to create compelling, seamless experiences that combine the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices. Guiding Principles There are three overarching principles guiding our services strategy – principles informing the design and development of products being implemented across all parts of Microsoft, for both individuals and business.

1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.

The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. Elements of this social mesh will be a first-class attribute of most all software and service experiences, as the “personal” of the PC meets the “inter-personal” of the web. Whether in work, play, or just life, the social element of software will continue to transform the ways that we interact with people with whom we have some affinity. All applications will grow to recognize and utilize the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View. We‟re also living in a world where the number and diversity of devices is on the rise; not just PCs and phones, but TVs, game consoles, digital picture frames, DVRs, media players, cameras and camcorders, home servers, home automation systems, our car‟s entertainment and navigation systems, and more. To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices – a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole. After identifying a device as being “yours”, its configuration and personalization settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices. Whether for media, control or access, scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment will be unified and enhanced by the concept of a device mesh.

2. The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud.

Most major enterprises are in the early stages of a significant infrastructural transition – from the use of dedicated and sometimes very expensive application servers, to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware to consolidate those enterprise applications on computing and storage grids constructed within their data center. This trend will accelerate as enterprise applications are progressively re-factored from a centralized “scale up” model to the horizontal “scale out” requirements of this new utility computing model.

Driven in large part by the high-scale requirements of consumer services, the value of this utility computing model is most clearly evident in cloud-based internet services. By extension, cloud-based enterprise utility computing, infrastructure services, and enterprise applications are all becoming a reality, affording IT a range of new choices in how to deploy solutions across and between enterprises; within their own data center, in a partner‟s hosting facility, or with the vendor itself in the cloud. Software built explicitly to provide a significant level of server/service symmetry will enable IT to balance factors such as cost and control, and to leverage the skills of its key personnel most effectively. It will afford choice and flexibility in developing, operating, migrating and managing such systems in highly varied enterprise deployment environments that are distributed and federated between the enterprise data center and the internet cloud.

3. Small Pieces Loosely Joined for developers, within the cloud and across a world of devices.

Application design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems, where standards and interoperability are essential. At the front-end, lightweight REST-based technologies have become ubiquitous, in some cases augmenting their WS-* counterparts, in integrating a broad variety of components combined seamlessly for the user at the surface of the browser. RSS and ATOM feeds have become lightweight channels and queues between software components. Declarative languages such as XAML have enabled rapid UI innovation and iteration. At a higher level, myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility. Developers will need to build applications that can be delivered seamlessly across a loosely coupled device mesh by utilizing a common set of tools, languages, runtimes and frameworks – a common toolset that spans from the service in the cloud to enterprise server, and from the PC to the browser to the phone. At the back-end, developers will need to contend with new programming models in the cloud. Whether running on an enterprise grid, or within the true utility computing environment of cloud-based infrastructure, the way a developer will write code, deploy it, debug it, and maintain it will be transformed. The cloud-based environment consists of vast arrays of commodity computers, with storage and the programs themselves being spread across those arrays for scale and redundancy, and loose coupling between the tiers. Independent developers and enterprises alike will move from “scale up” to “scale out” back-end design patterns, embracing this model for its cost, resiliency, flexible capacity, and geo-distribution. Transformation of our Offerings Successful experiences on the web are those that are organically compelling, highly engaging, and viral across their intended audience. By applying our three principles consistently across all the markets we serve, we have an opportunity to reshape our offerings for individuals, businesses, and developers, and to deliver a broad range of compelling scenarios.

CONNECTED DEVICES – We aspire to bring together Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile by creating seamless experiences that span these offerings. Windows Live, for example, enables seamless communications and media experiences across Windows, Windows Mobile, and the Web. Live Mesh, a new services platform technology that will also become part of Windows Live, further extends the Windows / Windows Mobile / Windows Live experience by bringing your devices together to work in concert with one another using the web as a hub, enabling: Unified Device Management – Users will register their devices through a simple, web-based service. Once a part of a user‟s device mesh, whenever they happen to connect to the internet the devices “report in” to the service – e.g. for status, health, location, and to exchange/synchronize information. Mesh-aware device configuration/personalization will be done through the web, and full remote control of a device (e.g. remote desktop) will be available from anywhere. Unified Application Management – Installation and management of “mesh-aware” applications on any or all devices, along with their application settings and data, will be simple and transparent for the user. Individuals will now enjoy the centralized cross-device purchase/deployment experience formerly available only within the enterprise environment.

Unified Data Management – Folders and files (e.g. documents and media) will be automatically synchronized and made available across any or all devices, as well as through the web. Because every folder can now have an extended web presence, even PC-based documents and media can now have a social mesh element to them.

CONNECTED ENTERTAINMENT – Building upon our device mesh vision, our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license media once, organize their subscriptions and collections once, and use any of their mesh-connected devices to access and enjoy their media – from the living room to the desktop to their pockets. And building upon our social mesh vision being interwoven into everything we do, each individual will be afforded a media-centric or gaming-centric web presence through which they can express their tastes/interests/affinities and interact with others through linking, sharing, ranking and tagging of music, video, photos, games, and more. This vision is being realized today through the Zune Social for media and Xbox LIVE for gaming. Services such as the MSN.com home page, MSN Mobile, MSN Video, Zune Marketplace and software such as Windows Mobile, Microsoft Mediaroom and Windows Media Center will be progressively transformed by this connected entertainment vision.

CONNECTED PRODUCTIVITY – Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each – the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of „personal productivity‟ into the realm of the „inter-personal‟ through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity-centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.

CONNECTED BUSINESS – We will extend the benefits of high-scale cloud-based infrastructure and services to enterprises, in a way that gives them choice and flexibility in intermixing on-premises deployment, partner hosting, or cloud-based service delivery. Businesses large and small will benefit from services that make it easy to dynamically connect and collaborate with partners and customers, using the web to enable a business mesh. Business customers of all sizes will benefit from web-based business services. This vision is being realized today through the likes of Office Live Small Business. For enterprises, our new Microsoft Online Services provide managed, service-based infrastructure through offerings including SharePoint, Exchange, OCS, and Dynamics CRM. Our enterprise solution platform extends to the cloud through SQL Server Data Services, BizTalk Services, and many more services to come. At the lowest level within the enterprise data center, we‟ve begun to deliver on our utility computing vision, with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, and through our Systems Center products including Virtual Machine Manager.

CONNECTED DEVELOPMENT – As individuals embrace a world of devices and our device mesh vision, and as businesses embrace cloud-based services and server/service symmetry, developers will need platforms and tools that span seamlessly from cloud to server on the back-end, and from PC to browser to phone (and more) on the front-end. This vision is being realized today in our .NET family of runtimes including .NET Framework and Silverlight, supported by Expression Studio for designers and Visual Studio for developers, enabling developers to leverage their skills across all these environments. Our tools will be designed to support development of solutions that seamlessly incorporate multiple tiers, with some pieces on the PC, and others on the web or mobile; with some pieces on an enterprise server, and others running cloud-based utility computing infrastructure.

Transformation of our Company As our industry has evolved because of this web-catalyzed services transformation, so too has Microsoft. More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market. Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly „software‟, not „services‟, that was top of mind. Since then, we‟ve made tremendous progress in our expansion toward „software+services‟ – from the long-term quests we‟ve undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we‟ve begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline. In light of all the work that we‟re doing, it‟s important that we build a shared sense of what Microsoft‟s path looks like in this transition toward software+services. For consumers, advertisers and publishers, our investments in new forms of content, community, commerce, search and advertising are key. We‟re investing significantly to ensure tremendous audience engagement, and to provide an attractive and well-targetable audience, ensuring that we continue to be an attractive partner for advertisers and publishers within a vibrant and competitive advertising ecosystem. For customers and partners who use and who‟ve invested in Microsoft‟s myriad offerings, we feel there‟s tremendous growth potential in moving toward a world that fully embraces software, services and the web. The device mesh, the social mesh, cloud-based infrastructure, and server/service symmetry represent great opportunities across all markets we serve. Over the course of this year, and progressively over the next few years, you‟ll see the principles and scenarios laid out in this document come to life through many new and service-enhanced products and services for individuals, businesses and developers. As you do, I hope you‟ll share my excitement and optimism as you experience how we‟re bringing together the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices. Ray Ozzie"

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 (i.e., File A may sync with Users 1, 2, and 3, while File B may only be told to sync with Users 1 and 2).

Mesh is a combination of web based services that sync files and information across a cloud environment, and client software that allows individual devices to sync with the Mesh. This is a continuation of Microsoft's "software plus services" strategy, in which client software is augmented by (or reliant upon) web services.

The News Feed

While Mesh doesn't have any version control capabilities yet -- a must for a service that syncs data between multiple users -- it does borrow a popular feature from the web for keeping users up-to-date on what's going on across a system: the news feed. 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 (more on that below), it is easy to envision how much more could be pushed through the news feed. We were shown a demo application that synced tweets on Twitter with the Mesh Notifier, for example. As more services use the Live Mesh platform, could it, or a service built on top of it, eat FriendFeed's lunch?

The Platform

What makes Live Mesh potentially very special is that Microsoft has turned synchronization into a platform. Eventually, services as well as devices will be able to hook into Mesh. We were shown some early demos of the type of things Microsoft envisions for the Mesh service that were quite impressive. In one proof-of-concept demo, a photo that was taken via a cell phone camera, was automatically synced to a Mesh that pushed the pictures out to a Facebook photo album.

It was certainly impressive to see data -- in this case a cell phone camera picture -- almost instantly synced across multiple devices and saved to a web service immediately after it was created. Microsoft envisions Mesh as a platform for data synchronization for any service we use and for any type of data. Ideally, for example, if someone were to comment on that photo at Facebook, the comment would sync to anywhere else that photo was hosted (your desktop computer, the desktop computers of anyone sharing the photo, your laptop, other photo sharing sites, etc.).

Taking On Google Gears?

Perhaps the most interesting bit that Microsoft demoed to us was an offline compontent of the Mesh platform. Web apps using the Mesh platform will be able to lean on the client software to take their web applications offline, including all user data, and sync it up when the user gets back online at a later time.

Microsoft is taking an offline approach that is more akin to Google Gears or Mozilla Prism than Adobe AIR -- the web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual web app. The same HTML and JavaScript, etc. runs in a desktop window in offline mode, data is stored locally, and synced later. The difference is that Microsoft is ting offline access into the Mesh service, so developers don't just get the technology to take their apps offline, but also access to the synchronization and cloud storage services to move their data back and forth.

We've talked about the importance of web apps on the desktop on this blog, so this could be an important component of Mesh.

Will It Work?

It is still very early for Mesh. Microsoft intends to invite key development partners to try out the system in the next few weeks, and will roll out support for other devices (including mobile and Mac) over the next year. One thing that could hinder Mesh, though, is Microsoft's rather confused marketing around its online services. Between Mesh, SkyDrive, Live Spaces, and FolderShare there is so much overlap in Microsoft's services that users are bound to get confused.

Ideally, Mesh will be a platform that will tie all of Microsoft's online storage, synchronization, and sharing services together -- along with other, third party services. But the confusing muddle that is Microsoft Live could stymie mainstream adoption. Microsoft needs to clean up their act and present a more clear marketing message.

Software + services is also a potentially tougher sell than software as a service -- people don't like downloading things. Still, Microsoft has created a compelling product that they hope will standardize synchronization across the universe of devices and web services we each use every day. The prospect of getting easy access to user data on multiple devices could be attractive for developers and prompt them to embrace the platform, but it is probably too early to make any specific predictions.

Ray Ozzie Memo

Accompanying the launch of Live Mesh is a new memo from Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. It notes that Microsoft sees the Web as "the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." Ozzie calls this "social mesh" and writes that "in scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View."

UPDATE: here is the full text of Ray Ozzie's memo

The first key point is that Microsoft sees the Web as "the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." Ozzie calls this "social mesh" and writes that "in scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View."

On the face of it, this is an acknowledgement from Ray Ozzie that the Web is at the center of software as a service. However, we all know that Windows is really at the center of Microsoft's strategy. This isn't explicitly stated in Ozzie's memo, but he does explain how the Web and the PC are intimately connected in this new world:

"To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices – a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole. After identifying a device as being “yours”, its configuration and personalization settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices. Whether for media, control or access, scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment will be unified and enhanced by the concept of a device mesh."

Ultimately Live Mesh is a product that enables Microsoft to bring their Windows software paradigm fully into the Web age via the concept of the "mesh". This extract, about connected devices, explains:

"We aspire to bring together Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile by creating seamless experiences that span these offerings. Windows Live, for example, enables seamless communications and media experiences across Windows, Windows Mobile, and the Web. Live Mesh, a new services platform technology that will also become part of Windows Live, further extends the Windows / Windows Mobile / Windows Live experience by bringing your devices together to work in concert with one another using the web as a hub [...]"

The full memo will be made public tomorrow morning, after Microsoft staff have seen it. We will publish the memo in its entirely tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb.

UPDATE: here is the full text of Ray Ozzie's memo