Microsoft’s Live Mesh heading to the clouds
by Celine Roque
Back in April of this year, Microsoft presented Live Mesh, a new product geared towards consumers who want a “Web-based service for synchronizing files and data folders across different devices” (ITWorld). Now, however, it seems Microsoft is geared to make it a full-blown cloud computing platform. Here’s what’s on the agenda for the Professional Developers Conference 2008 in October regarding Live Mesh:
“The Live Mesh cloud services and client platform provide powerful FeedSync-based data synchronization capabilities, device P2P and cloud-relay communications, pub-sub infrastructure, and an extensibility model for applications. This session describes how you can take advantage of the Mesh developer platform, protocols, and APIs to mesh-enable your existing and future web services and client applications-allowing you to target unique new scenarios and reach new users.”
Whether Live Mesh succeeds as a cloud computing platform or not, it’s still interesting to me from the point of view of the home cloud storage I wrote about in an earlier post. Live Mesh enables multiple devices to share folders and keep them in sync, as well as store files on the web. It even has a Live Desktop feature that lets you connect to and control remote PCs so you can access your files from anywhere.
But promising as it is, the problem with Live Mesh is that it’s fundamentally a Microsoft product, and will not work in tandem with Apple or Linux-based computers. Another is that shuffling files from a computer to the web takes bandwidth, and with some ISPs setting a cap, it may be a concern for some people. Currently, sharing folders requires online storage, but sources say that an offline version is in the works, which will make it a truly home-based cloud.
Anybody care to make a free cross-platform version, preferably open source? Will the developer community support the platform? Send in your thoughts below.
