http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1355

Mary Jo Fowley's "Ten Things to know about Microsoft's Live Mesh" is well worth reading.

Some interesting snippets here:

http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2008/04/25/gillmor-gang-042508/

Gartner's first take:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=655117

"The technology will appeal to enterprises"

"Pressure Microsoft to clarify how its new and existing offerings overlap"

"If other Microsoft divisions or significant third-party applications or platforms have not made specific commitments to support Live Mesh by year-end 2009, consider the project interesting but inconsequential, much like Microsoft's earlier "Hailstorm," Groove Networks and Simple Sharing Extension initiatives. Live Mesh subsumes these efforts with a broader scope and more ambitious goals, and it is backed by the increasingly influential Ray Ozzie."

Ouch and double ouch. Time to re-name this user group?  (0.6 probability)

Steve Gillmor's reflection in TechCrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/27/just-say-yes/

(Would someone please define SocMedBS for me? Social Media - BS?)

Ray Ozzie:

"From the developer's perspective, Live Mesh is actually a platform. What you see with Live Mesh when you download it is a very small piece, from the user's perspective, of what it actually is, because it was built to enable innovation in a variety of ways. You can kind of think of what you see as the shell. If Windows or an OS has a broad sort of capabilities that is exposed by its APIs to developers, the shell, the command line of an OS or the Finder or the desktop within Windows is a thin exposure of that to users. For Live Mesh, file and folder synchronization is that small amount that gives the user a taste for the capabilities of this platform. "

"One of the things that we inadvertently stumbled upon in Groove was that enterprises wanted to use this technology to help them extend the functions of their websites out to a world of devices. That isn't what Groove was designed to do. It was more designed as a peer sharing mechanism. So one of the things that Live Mesh is all about is essentially, from day one, providing a centralized infrastructure such that this platform that's on all of the clients goes to this one service in the cloud to manage, all under the covers, all the synchronization. Now the actual data may flow peer-to-peer, it might flow relayed through the cloud encrypted, but one thing that is for certain is that an arbitrary web site won't have to deal with the complexities of synchronization. They can develop an application, using technologies that they are familiar with -- web development technologies -- and develop a piece of that application that gets downloaded to the client, that has local storage synchronized with the web site, they can update the application and the updates get distributed transparently... "

"The biggest difference between Groove and Notes was that Groove embraced the concept of ad-hoc interaction much more in terms of inviting people into a shared environment. So those invitation models are essentially borrowed from Groove into Live Mesh. So if you are a Groove user, you will feel very comfortable with that model in dealing with Live Mesh."

"Broad availability of the dev platform, would be at our PDC, our professional developer conference, this fall."

http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell/Ray-Ozzie-introduces-Live-Mesh/