Welcome to the Mesh

Brad Feld recently mentioned in a post Microsoft's new product called, "Live Mesh".  I thought it looked interesting enough to sign up for the private beta, and just in time for the weekend, my invitation arrived to try it out.  If you are currently using Foldershare from Microsoft as a way to sync folders easily across multiple computers, you're going to want to try out the mesh.  In addition to syncing folders, you can also do remote desktop sharing.

I just used it and saved enough time to write this post.  :-)  I was trying to find a website that I looked at this morning at home, but I had not saved the URL.  (All of my Favorite URLs are synced between my machines, including the FJ Car Computer using Foldershare, so if I had saved the URL I would have had it at work this morning.)  Then I remembered the mesh - I clicked on the little blue icon    and was able to connect to my home machine in seconds.  I'm at work, but it is as if I'm sitting at my machine at home.  The web browser was still sitting there on the page where I left it this morning.  I got what I needed and then saved the page to my Favorites.  Before I could log off, Foldershare had synced that new Favorite to all four of my machines - two at home, and two at work.  With the Mesh, I should be able to do the same thing.  Also there is "storage in the cloud" so I can have a bunch of disk space that is accessible from any web browser, even if none of my machines are running.

The Mesh is being called a platform, and this is just the demo app according to the team blog that I read.  They already are saying they will sync to Apple and to mobile devices in the near future, but they talk about a lot more.  Should be interesting.  At the very least, I'll be able to move everything from Foldershare and have remote login capability.  When the car computer goes back into the FJ, I'll be able to work on it from anywhere without having to sit in the garage with a little keyboard on my lap.  That alone is worth the upgrade.

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