Jamie's space: Live Mesh

Mesh application startups in Boston

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:37:24 GMT

An interesting little titbit of Mesh news here. Microspotting has interviewed Reed Sturvenant who heads up Microsoft Startup labs in Boston. Here's what the group do (taken from the interview)

The idea is to create an internal, Boston-based development group that can build products and launch them to market the same way that start-ups do.

What is of most interest to me though is this quote:

We’ve been asked to focus on two things: products that will attract a large enthusiastic audience, and to help drive new strategic platforms. So for example we’re using the Live Mesh SDK and building a set of applications on top of that.

So Microsoft are setting up a Silicon-Valley-esque enclave in Boston with the express purposes of building applications for Mesh. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

-Jamie

Mesh’s hidden agenda

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:19:37 GMT

I’m sat on my train home listening to last Friday’s (25th July 2008) episode of The Gillmor Gang; for those that don’t know The Gillmor Gang is a conglomerate of technology pontificators based in Silicon Valley that are headed by Steve Gillmor. On this particular episode they’re talking about what they think Microsoft are doing and are going to do in the online space - well worth a listen if you’re interested in such things (as I am).

They talk a lot about Mesh, XBox, Ray Ozzie, Live Search and the relative relevancy (or not) of each. They didn’t come to any conclusion about any of it but it was fun nonetheless although I do think they missed an important point about Mesh and search. Its something that’s been rolling around my head for a while and the point is this. If Mesh is a success (and I believe that it will be) then there is going to be a lot of information (gigabytes worth) per person stored in the cloud and across a multitude of devices that crucially only Microsoft has access to. And what is the best way of making sense of information of that magnitude? Search, that’s what!

Hence I predict that we will see a new kind of search engine from Microsoft. One that shows information from the web alongside and interspersed with your own content and that which your friends have chosen to share with you. If you are logged into http://search.live.com then Microsoft can return to you search results of YOUR OWN STUFF and that is a game changer in search. As Joe Wilcox said earlier today “Search should be about what's important to you.”

Let’s take an example. Imagine you remember that you had recently been reading a Word document about balaclavas; you don’t know whereabouts you have the document but you know its in your Mesh somewhere. Instead of hunting around for it you head for http://search.live.com and search your Mesh from Microsoft’s own search engine. In your results you find the document that you’re looking for and also get back helpful information from Live Search including where you can buy the cheapest balaclavas and all the information you ever wanted to know about them too. Ever wonder why in Microsoft Office 2007 all the documents are saved as XML files? Simple…it makes it easier to search them.

Want another reason? How about being able to search through all of your Messenger conversations from http://search.live.com.

There are other ways that Mesh and Live Search can be mutually compatible too. As my colleague at Conchango Paul Dawson points out in his blog entry Live Services - Social Search - Collaborative research social search is evolving:

Using the Live Messenger services, and the Live Search services to create 'social search' - or in my book, a nice way of being able to share online research with someone - or a group.
it's what we've been talking about for many of our clients. You can see this being used for a group, or a couple, planning a holiday or a trip, sharing their early research, and testing ideas on where to go with each other.

Paul and I have spoken about this a lot lately as we try and cook up some ways that we can use Mesh in the future. Mesh presents a great opportunity for conducting your research via a search engine and “shelving” your search results so that you or someone else can view them later.

Live Search and Live Mesh– a winning combination. You heard it here first.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, live search, live mesh, story

Storing Messenger conversations on the Mesh

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:57:10 GMT

As I interact more and more with Live Mesh I'm having more and more ideas about how it could be leveraged. Even if you have access to www.mesh.com right now you really haven't been a party to the full Mesh experience; no-one outside of Microsoft has. Its intriguing though to think about what will be possible when the platform really hits its straps.

With that in mind here's a feature request for the Live Messenger team. Currently I don't save my Live Messenger conversations but often I'll think to myself "Ahhh...I once talked about that with someone in a Messenger conversation, pity I don't have a record of it". I'm sure I'm not the only person that does that. Wouldn't it be cool if all of our Messenger conversations were automatically saved to the Mesh? That way every conversation I have would be recorded and I would be able to search through them all as well.

Furthermore, once our conversations are stored on the Mesh then we can access them all programatically using the Mesh APIs that will soon be delivered and take that content, our content, and share it to wherever we want to share it to. Perhaps we could choose that our conversations are searchable for other people; perhaps http://search.live.com/messenger becomes a window onto a wealth of thoughts and ideas that until now simply don't exist because they're not recorded anywhere. There's lots of possibilities here when you start to think of Mesh as more than just a file sync engine.

Better still, it wouldn't just do this with typed conversations. My audio and/or video conversations would be recorded too. And THEY become searchable as well.

I think this is a pretty exciting possibility. What do you think?

-Jamie

UPDATE: More discussion of this here: http://jamiethomson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!550F681DAD532637!5132.entry

Cosmos: The infrastructure for Windows Live

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:12:09 GMT

Yaron Goland doesn’t say very much on his blog but when he does its usually something well worth reading. Today he wrote one such blog What is Microsoft's Cosmos service?.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what Yaron is talking about (his brain is on a higher plane to mine) but as a data guy by trade I’m fascinated by Cosmos which is, according to Yaron:

…Microsoft's internal data storage/query system for analyzing enormous amounts (as in petabytes) of data
…the architecture Microsoft uses to store and query petabytes of data
…a very successful system that is growing at a breakneck pace both in terms of the number of customers we support and the size of the clusters we run

I don’t want to jump to too many assumptions but I wouldn’t mind guessing that Cosmos is the infrastructure that is underpinning the massive amounts of data that Live Mesh will need to store.

Yaron mentions that Cosmos runs upon Dryad which is a system from Microsoft Research that runs computationally heavy processes over parallel architectures. Dryad is particularly interesting to me because its first outing was as a means for speeding up the processing of massive data volumes using SQL Server Integration Services (otherwise known as SSIS, the product for which I gained my MVP award and earn my corn). I previously talked about SSIS and Dryad here: http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2007/11/13/Dryad.aspx where I pick out the following quote:

Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming

Fascinating stuff. The worlds that I inhabit (SQL Server and Windows Live) are growing closer and closer together. When you read about infrastructure of this magnitude then you start to realise why there is only a handful of companies in the world that have anything like the capacity for building a tool like Live Mesh. Just to put it into context for you a petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or 1,000,000 gigabytes. Whichever way you cut it words can’t really describe the enormity of “petabytes of data”.

-Jamie

A tour around Live Desktop

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:26:14 GMT

2 days ago the Live Mesh team released an update to Live Mesh that enables us to sync files peer-to-peer (i.e. device-to-device) without syncing them to the cloud. I’ve produced a video that shows how this manifests itself in the Live Desktop which I’ve embedded below.

Let me know your thoughts. Do you want more of these types of short show-and-tell videos? If so I’ll see what I can do.

-Jamie

P.S. The video is hosted on Silverlight Streaming. You will need Silverlight installed in order to view it.Windows Live Tags: Clubhouse, Live Mesh, How-to

Will Mesh become my web touchpoint?

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:58:56 GMT

I read with interest Tim Anderson's piece entitled MobileMe steals Live Mesh thunder. There was a couple of inaccuracies but it was generally a good article.

Here are 2 choices quote from the article that largely sums up Tim's point:

"Now, Live Mesh is great for file synch, but how do I synch email with it? Where is the Live Mesh calendar? Ah no, for that you need Live Mail."
"An it-just-works solution to PIM synchronization across all devices and on the web will be a winner."

Apart from the fact that Live Mail doesn't contain a calendar I wholeheartedly agree.

Microsoft released some good and some not so good products and services as part of Windows Live waves 1 and 2; by and large I'm a fan as you've probably noticed if you read this blog regularly. Therein though lies the rub; Windows Live is a suite of disparate offerings such as Spaces, Hotmail, Messenger, Live Mail, Calendar, Messenger and Photo Gallery. When I use these things I never get the impression that I am accessing one seamless Windows Live experience. http://home.live.com is a commendable attempt to alleviate some of this disparity but we still have a situation where on the PC my photos reside in Live Photo Gallery, email resides in Live Mail, instant messaging resides in Live Messenger, my calendar resides in errrr... nowhere. This isn't the seamless experience that we thought we were going to get.

My hope is that Live Mesh ushers in a new era of cohesion for Windows Live products and other services besides. You want to read your email? Go to Mesh. You want to communicate with your friends in real-time? Go to Mesh. Want to Twitter? Go to Mesh. Want to see your bank balance? Go to Mesh. Want to see an up to date electricity bill? Go to Mesh.

If all of these personal services become accessible in one single place using one single login then that makes my life much easier. I hope that place is http://www.mesh.com.

-Jamie

SkyDrive API revisited

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:28:59 GMT

On 20th August 2007 I wrote a blog entry called "What would you put in a SkydriveAPI?" which was written in response to Angus Logan's question:

What APIs would you want to see for SkyDrive?

(http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/archive/2007/08/20/got-code-plex-skydrive-screenscrapery-up-there.aspx)

That is consistently one of my highest visited blogs because at the time of writing it comes up as the first result if you do a search for "Skydrive API" on Google. Clearly people are searching for information about a SkyDrive API so clearly one is desired.

Here we are over 10 months later and the expected Skydrive API has not yet materialised. My suspicion is that the impending developer-focused releases of Live Mesh has stalled a Skydrive API because the two cover very similar ground (i.e. cloud-storage, file-collaboration).

In my blog entry of last year the respondents and I compiled the following list of "wants" for a cloud storage API:

Store documents created using traditonal desktop software (e.g. MS Office) directly to cloud storage
Store documents created in other online software (such as Google Docs) in cloud storage
Embed cloud storage viewers into social networking sites and other websites
Access cloud storage from rich clients on a mobile phone
Synchronise traditional hard drive storage with cloud storage. This includes the hard drive on my smartphone.
Play media stored in cloud storage in the media players I have on my PC
Sync my Zune directly with media store in cloud storage
The ability to write a plugin to backup Windows Home Server to cloud storage
Would like cloud storage to act like a normal drive in My Computer
Have a sync tool like Groove
Very important to support 64 bit

[N.B. In all of these cases I have substituted the term "SkyDrive" with "cloud storage" because that encompasses both SkyDrive and Mesh which is what I am comparing in this blog entry]

The question I now find myself asking is "How much of this list will be provided by a Mesh API?" Even writing as I am prior to the release of such a thing I strongly suspect that a Mesh API will encompass all of the above requirements. Equally, I believe that SkyDrive will be exposed as a "virtual" device within Live Mesh thus SkyDrive effectively becomes the publicly-available portion of Mesh and http://skydrive.live.com becomes the window into it. Hence, the Mesh API will be all we need to interact with SkyDrive - the need for a SkyDrive-specific API has disappeared.

So, my supposition is that we will never see a SkyDrive API. Do you agree?

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, mesh, skyDrive, story, API

What Mesh could bring to Zune

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:55:36 GMT

If you read regularly then you’ll know I’m very interested in Mesh and Zune and have talked a lot about both in isolation so today I turned my thoughts to what benefits Mesh could bring to my Zune experience if the two were working together. As a result I posted some suggestions up on the Zune forums. Here they are for anyone that may be interested:

I would like the whole of my Zune experience to work atop the Live Mesh infrastructure that is currently getting implemented. Given that Live Mesh is a synchronisation platform there would be many benefits over and above what we have now:

Ability to see (and administer) my media collection on any device (e.g. Zune, computer, Media Center, XBox, Mac)
Currently to subscribe to a podcast I have to go to the computer on which I have Zune software installed. That's not good because that computer is at home and I encounter podcasts that I want to subscribe to throughout the day. If the Zune experience were running on Live Mesh then I could subscribe to the podcast there and then and have it sync to my Zune device next time I plug in.
Zune software is very CPU intensive, especially when syncing. Mesh syncs in the background during CPU idle time
Plays by my friends can get synced to my Mesh even when I'm not "online". So, I can browse to the Zune application running on my Mesh at any time and see what all my friends are listening to in real-time
I can buy songs on Zune Marketplace (or, in fact, anywhere) and save them to my media collection no matter where I am - just so long as I'm online.
If my media collection is "on the Mesh" then it will be accessible to other applications as well, not just Zune. So, perhaps my media collection could end up on my phone as well, or be used by my Sonos system etc...
Mesh should make it easier for me to view my friends' playlists as well. If they existed on the Mesh then they just have to share those with me just as we will do with anything on the Mesh.

What do you think? Any other ways that Zune can leverage Mesh?

-Jamie

A sneak peek at Mesh

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:01:32 GMT

For those of you that don't have access to Mesh (and that give a crap), I thought you might appreciate a quick taster of one part of it. Here is a screenshot of my contact page, everyone on the Mesh has one.

I only actually discovered this myself for the first time just this morning and I've been using Mesh for a few weeks now so its definitely hidden away. There's some interesting things to note here.

Firstly, the profile information that you see comes from my Live Spaces profile. Does that mean that everyone that uses Live Mesh is expected to go and fill in their information at Live Spaces? I hope not, that doesn't seem like a good way of winning public opinion to me given that Live Spaces' reputation aint exactly the greatest. Another question; if Microsoft allow us to login to Mesh using OpenID as I postulated on Tuesday (and the answer given to my question about OpenID in the Live Mesh forum doesn't make me think that they won't) where are they going to get the profile information from? Well the answer to that should be another burgeoning technology that I am passionate about, FOAF (go and read about it).

Aside from that there's not too much to write home about here. Its got the now ubiquitous newsfeed, it aggregates a list of shared folders that you are a member of and well...that's about it. Mesh is only as good as the applications that run on it though and right now there aren't any other than file sync. There's going to be a lot of value in the newsfeed once we are running applications on Mesh, I'm sure it won't be long before I start seeing everything from my Twitter feed appear on here for example.

Keep coming back for future posts. I'll have a lot more to say about Mesh.

-Jamie

A Live Mesh idea - A personalised news service

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:00:25 GMT

On my way to work this morning I was, as usual, sat on the train listening to podcasts that got synced to my Zune overnight. I looked around me and noticed that everyone else was either listening to their iPods or, in the case of the majority, reading a newspaper. That's when I had a brainwave. Wouldn't it be cool if I picked up my Zune every morning and it had all the latest local and international news stories synced to it ready for me to read or watch on the way in?

The days of dead-tree-based "newspapers" are numbered. If you want proof of that then consider that I walked into work yesterday and I was the only person there that knew about the earthquake in China that had happened about 30 minutes earlier. Why was that? It was because I was reading about it on Twitter before the news agencies even knew anything about it. Newspapers have it even worse - by the time you're reading about something in a newspaper its already old news - the newspaper got printed hours ago. Up to the minute, free, news feeds are the future and my startling realisation this morning was that I already had a device that was capable of being that digital news reader. The only thing required to fill the gap now is software.

Live Mesh could fill that gap very nicely. Imagine a software application that collected news stories for me that it thinks I would be interested in (based on my interests and previous reading habits) while I'm busy at work or even as I sleep. Now imagine that those news stories are available to me on whichever device I happen to have in my hand next. That's the promise of Mesh.

Traditional bricks-and-mortar media companies should be very scared indeed. If they aren't already.

-Jamie

P.S. I originally published this idea on the Zune forums before I realised that, actually, this is more about Mesh than about Zune.

SSDS and Mesh

Thu, 01 May 2008 21:44:11 GMT

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) and Live Mesh are the two technologies that are uppermost in my mind at the moment. [My thoughts on SSDS are here and on Live Mesh here.] Hence then it didn't take me long to start wondering about the value of the two of them being integrated together. SSDS is a data storage platform and Live Mesh is a data synchronisation platform so put them together and you have the ability to synchronise data stored in SSDS to...well...anywhere that Live Mesh can run. Perhaps Mesh could even be used to synchronise data from one SSDS authority to another?

In order for this to happen an adapter would need to be written that exposes an SSDS data store as a "virtual" device. I sent a message to the SSDS team via their blog site The Long Term Storecast and I got a reply basically saying they would consider it so here's hoping that this gets implemented. I suspect they have got plenty of time because I don't expect SSDS to get released out of beta until 2009.

What sort of applications do you envisage being built on an SSDS-Mesh tag team? I have a couple of embryonic ideas that need fleshing out a wee bit (euphemistically speaking) but in the meantime I have no doubt there's going to be some killer apps built on these platforms.

-Jamie

[crossposted here]

Monster Mesh

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:13:41 GMT

Live Mesh was released to some of the general public seven days ago and luckily I was able to get an invite. I know there has been many many comments on the web passing opinion on Live Mesh thus far so one more can't hurt can it? Hence this blog entry, although perhaps I can offer a slightly different perspective.

Foldershare

The first question I asked myself when I saw Live Mesh was "What now becomes of Foldershare?" Prior to Live Mesh's release I was assuming that there would be a heavy tie-in with Foldershare ("Foldershare would seem to dovetail quite nicely with [Live Mesh]") but I was very wrong about that. Now I find myself asking what happens to Foldershare and, moreover, why did Microsoft buy it? I'm guessing that they bought it for the skills of the Foldershare staff and the established customer base which they will now hope will migrate over to Live Mesh. I expect Foldershare to die a slow death eventually. This would explain why the recent release of Foldershare didn't support login with Live ID - that would be stepping too far into Mesh's territory.

Skydrive

Is Skydrive going to die as well? I suspect not. For now, Skydrive has two important features that Mesh does not have:

The ability to share a file with any anonymous person on the internet
The ability to link to a file with a URL (OK, under the covers Mesh has this because every object is a RESTful resource but it is not exposed to the general user)

For those reasons Skydrive still has an important role to play. I suspect that synchronisation between Skydrive and Mesh will occur at some point.

Windows Live Groups

I was very excited by the words of Mike Zintel over on the Live Mesh blog:

Live Mesh provides the building blocks to support the notion of groups, or communities (member lists) of people associated with a mesh object. These lists are managed via the simple email-web confirmation exchange that is popular on the web. Member lists provide both a simple permission model and a natural scoping for the collaboration features of Mesh. The basic group mechanism can be trivially extended to add entities such as organizations to participate (in an assigned “role”). Similarly, you might invite a SpellChecker bot into a group.

By mention of a bot its very clear that Mike is talking about forming groups of Windows Live IDs (bots are identified by Windows Live IDs). Hey, that sounds very much like my Active Directory In The Cloud idea that I keep banging on about. Defining groups of users and assigning permissions to those groups is an immensely powerful paradigm and even more so when you consider the propensity for collaboration that Mesh will inherently foster. I believe that this is what Windows Live Groups will bring rather than being a like-for-like replacement for MSN Groups and am really looking forward to finding out if I am right.

The future platform

As we all move to a more web-centric world Mesh is a portent of things to come from Microsoft. They seem to have realised that in order to compete in the future they need to do more than rely on the cash cow tag team of Windows and Office, and Live Mesh will be the platform for this web-centric world. As applications move into the cloud the operating system moves back to what it was always meant to be, software that manages your hardware rather than app-ridden, feature-heavy bloatware. Operating systems are going to get more and more commoditised hence I hereby re-assert my belief that Windows will, one day, be free.

Making Money

How are Microsoft going to make money off this thing? The simple answer at this point in time would seem to be "Advertising" about which I asked on the Live Mesh forum the other day:

When Live Mesh gets released will it contain advertisements?

The unsurprisingly non-committal answer was:

Business terms for the platform are still being determined; we will provide additional information as we approach a beta release.

Don't be surprised to see ads appear on Mesh when it gets released in some way shape or form. This would prove to be a huge money spinner because the amount of time spent with eyeballs on Mesh will be much longer than on, say, a page of search engine results. As VP of Windows Live Platform, Blake Irving, said last summer search accounts for only about 5% of what people do on the web. I'll stick my neck out here and say that in, ooo... let's say, four years from today Microsoft will be making more from online advertising than anyone else and Mesh will be the driver for that.

[Actually these interviews with Blake Irving are well worth watching now because its clear that Mesh is the realisation of a lot of what he is talking about. He even talks about Mesh in video 2 without actually putting a name on it]

Applications

Its been stated all over the internet to anyone who'll listen; Mesh isn't a product, its a platform and I'm excited to see what applications people are going to build on this in the near future. I wonder whether we will see traditional desktop apps such as Office deployed upon it - I suspect that one day we will.

Here are some ideas that could be realised by leveraging Mesh:

The ability to always have any-time access to your banking transaction history along with the ability to set up personal alerts for possible fraudulent activity is detected
Monitor your utility (i.e. gas, electricity, water) bills and energy consumption in real-time
You may have seen those huge iPod vending machines that are now appearing in various airports around the world. Well instead of the flogging of tangible devices, imagine the ability to approach a digital kiosk in a similar fashion and purchase digital content (e.g. songs or films), save that content to your Mesh, and have it automatically sync to your mp3 player when you get home and plug-in. Or even better, immediately sync to your mobile phone over the airwaves.
Know about breaking news stories as and when they happen regardless of which device you are on

Those are just some ideas that allude to the potential of this sync platform. I'm sure there are plenty of killer apps that nobody has thought of yet.

If you want to get some idea of where Microsoft want to go with applications on Mesh then Ori Amiga's video "Programming the Mesh" is essential viewing.

Live Mesh forum

Don't forget that if you have questions about Mesh or feature requests the place to go is the Live Mesh forum.

-Jamie

How did my Mesh predictions go?

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:41:52 GMT

Six or seven weeks ago I wrote a blog entry entitled Speculating about Horizon where I made some wild predictions about what would constitute Horizon (aka Live mesh) when it got released. Let's see how I did:

"Given that Ray Ozzie talked about a way of connecting all of your PCs I'm wondering if Horizon will incorporate some sort of web-based remote access to your various PCs, a little bit like GoToMyPC.com, maybe through the form of a web-based RDP client. Terminal Services for the masses if you will."
Yep, I was correct about this. And RDP is indeed the underlying technology that is allowing it.
"Horizon seems to promise anytime access to your personal data hence I am wondering if Skydrive synchronisation will be incorporated into Foldershare. I hope so."
Mesh does indeed promise anytime access to your data however they seem to have built another platform for this rather than leveraging what Skydrive and Foldershare provide. Certainly there is no syncronisation between Skydrive and Foldershare at this point in time.
"Windows Live Favorites already allows us to synchronise our web favorites to the cloud and across different PCs so I would assume that there would be some sort of interface to view those Favorites from within Horizon as well. And why stop at Favorites? Why not make ALL of your desktop settings such as menubar setup, IE and Windows security settings, and word lists sync across all computers as well."
I still believe that this will happen, and I have definitely heard talk over the past few days about Favorites synchronisation, but there is no word on this as yet. I'll stick my neck out and say synchronising your Windows settings from one machine to another will be a big theme of Windows 7 and Live Mesh is going to be the enabler.
"Microsoft make money from building software that acts as a platform so I would assume that Horizon will also be a platform of sorts. In other words I would expect that there will be a way for 3rd party vendors to build Horizon add-ins; for example, Salesforce might provide an add-in to display your sales leads on Horizon. Of course, in the web world add-ins are known as "widgets" or "gadgets" so Microsoft are going to have to make a much better stab at this than the largely ignored Live.com and Live Gallery. "
I was definitely correct about the platform bit; it seems that not a single Live Mesh presentation or video goes by without them mentioning "Microsoft is a platform company and Mesh is a new platform". A platform for what though? Well Microsoft have not been shy about saying that 3rd parties will be able to build applications for Live Mesh and I have no qualms about saying that this will be a bigger better version of Facebook apps. Of course there will be the usual anti-Microsoft tirades about Facebook getting there first but that will miss the important point about Mesh - that those apps will run offline as well.
"Horizon" is the brand name for Windows Live wave 3.
No. I was wrong about this.
"Feedsync is going to be the standard that powers Horizon."
Yes, I was right about this although I can't claim too much credit given that they had all but announced it anyway.

So, yeah, in many ways I was pretty close but most of it was pretty obvious anyway. I'll have more to say about Live Mesh in the next few days.

-Jamie

Live Mesh titbit

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:53:44 GMT

Mesh doesn't support drag and drop to the cloud. Yet.

Oh, sorry, did I forget to say? Yes, I've got access to Live Mesh. Am I gloating? You betcha!

Lots more to come. I promise.

Speculating about Horizon

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:47:32 GMT

There has been a fair bit of commotion about Horizon and/or Mesh over the past few days so I thought it would be fun to speculate as to what it might entail. I'm not basing this on any insider information or anything like that, the only information I have to go on is the same as any of you.

Given that Ray Ozzie talked about a way of connecting all of your PCs I'm wondering if Horizon will incorporate some sort of web-based remote access to your various PCs, a little bit like GoToMyPC.com, maybe through the form of a web-based RDP client. Terminal Services for the masses if you will.
Horizon seems to promise anytime access to your personal data hence I am wondering if Skydrive synchronisation will be incorporated into Foldershare. I hope so.
Windows Live Favorites already allows us to synchronise our web favorites to the cloud and across different PCs so I would assume that there would be some sort of interface to view those Favorites from within Horizon as well. And why stop at Favorites? Why not make ALL of your desktop settings such as menubar setup, IE and Windows security settings, and word lists sync across all computers as well.
Microsoft make money from building software that acts as a platform so I would assume that Horizon will also be a platform of sorts. In other words I would expect that there will be a way for 3rd party vendors to build Horizon add-ins; for example, Salesforce might provide an add-in to display your sales leads on Horizon. Of course, in the web world add-ins are known as "widgets" or "gadgets" so Microsoft are going to have to make a much better stab at this than the largely ignored Live.com and Live Gallery.
Let's not forget Chris Jones' memo from summer 2007:

“Windows Live Wave 3 will be designed so it feels like a natural extension of the Windows experience. … We will ‘light up’ the Windows experience with Windows Live. … What’s the relationship between a Windows account and a Windows Live ID (Microsoft’s Web-authentication technology)? Should we have a LiveID connected to account settings?”

Reading between the lines I would guess that "Horizon" is the brand name for Windows Live wave 3.

As Joe Wilcox says the key to Microsoft's software+services strategy is synchronisation and he's spot on. Ozzie built a synchronization platform prior to Microsoft with Groove and since he joined Microsoft he's built another one with Feedsync. No wonder Microsoft are effectively open-sourcing Feedsync, its going to be the standard that powers Horizon and they want everyone to join the party.

What do you think?

-Jamie

UPDATE: Wouldn't you know it....30 minutes after I publish this and George Moore publishes this blog entry on the Windows Live dev blog. Here's my big takeaway:

Area Product, Library or Protocol
4: Synchronization infrastructure: "Astoria Offline"
Microsoft Sync Framework
Feedsync AtomPub extensions
3: Developer tools: ADO.NET Data Services
.NET WCF Syndication libraries
AtomPub URI namespace conventions
2: Protocols: AtomPub
Atom
1: Underlying Products and Services: On-premise: SQL Server
Structured Cloud Storage: SQL Server Data Services
Live services: Spaces Photos and Application Data Storage

While all of the above code is available for initial use, this stack is not complete – there is more to come at even higher levels of abstraction. I’ll leave you with an additional foreshadowed reference to future announcements in this space, again quoting from Ray Ozzie’s MIX08 keynote:

Before you know it, you in this audience are going to have the option of being the first to try out an early technology preview of this simple but incredibly useful new software and service. As this product emerges just over the horizon, I think you'll find it to be quite intriguing and key in delivering upon a compelling vision of a personal device mesh and of connected devices.

Quite obviously Horizon/Mesh is the "higher level of abstraction" being mentioned here. But enough of dripfeeding us information....show us the goods. Please.

Ozzie's cheeky clue about the web desktop

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:16:14 GMT

From Ray Ozzie's appearance in today's MIX08 keynote

As it just so happens we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for sometime now. Starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh for users, for developers. Using the web as a hub. Before you know it you in this audience are going to have the opportunity of being the first to try out an early technology preview of this simple but incredibly useful new software and service. As this product emerges, just over the horizon, I think you'll find it to be quite intriguing and key in delivering upon a vision of a personal device mesh of connected devices.

He chose his words very carefully. Windows Live Horizon obviously isn't far away now and information continues to trickle out about what it may be. I'm assuming there'll be something more concrete coming out before the end of the week and clearly Liveside's assessment of Horizon being "the web desktop" isn't far off the mark.

-Jamie

Area	Product, Library or Protocol
4: Synchronization infrastructure:	"Astoria Offline"
	Microsoft Sync Framework
	Feedsync AtomPub extensions
3: Developer tools:	ADO.NET Data Services
	.NET WCF Syndication libraries
	AtomPub URI namespace conventions
2: Protocols:	AtomPub
2: Protocols:	Atom
1: Underlying Products and Services:	On-premise: SQL Server
	Structured Cloud Storage: SQL Server Data Services
	Live services: Spaces Photos and Application Data Storage