Posted By: Sarah Perez | Jul 16th @ 9:11 AM

Before we even had an official announcement, LiveSide was reporting last night that folks were able to sign up for Windows Live Mesh if they were located in the U.S. 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

livemesh-logo If you haven’t checked out Mesh yet, you should. This software+services data synchronization platform isn't built with proprietary code, but rather with open protocols like HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON. Although Mesh's FeedSync is somewhat 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. 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.

Live Mesh also lets you access all your “meshified” computers remotely, so if you have software that is installed only on one PC, you can use Live Mesh to access that computer as interact with it as if you were sitting in front of it.

Although today’s release doesn’t include a Mac version, we know that it’s under development and should be available soon.

Rating:
0
0
what's differentiates this from Windows Live Foldershare. It seems kind of redundant to have two programs from the same company that look like they do the same thing.
I'm not fully qualified to answer your question but there is an interesting interview on Read Write Web (where Sarah also contributes) with Brian Hall from the Windows Live group who talks about how Live Mesh fits into the overall Windows Live story....

There are 3 parts to Windows Live, said Brian:
- Hosted services
- Peer to Peer
- Platform

[…]

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.

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


Full Interview: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_mesh_windows_live_integration.php