LiveSide - News blog : FeedSync

Ready for Live Mesh? LiveSide to bring you “Live Mesh news”

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:56:00 GMT

Next week, at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Microsoft is expected to unveil Live Mesh, a new product that will bring the first of Ray Ozzie’s services vision to light. Live Mesh combines a program installation on computers with a “web desktop”, or cloud based storage, and will allow computers on the “mesh” to synchronize folders among computers and to the cloud, share folders with others, and access computers on the mesh remotely from another computer or by accessing the “web desktop” via the internet.

We’ve been telling you about Live Mesh for quite some time, and as early as last December we told you to “pay attention to feedsync”. Then at Mix08 (and yeah I know the Mix badge is still on LiveSide, but have you checked out all the videos?), we deciphered Ray Ozzie’s cryptic messages for you, although the naming looks like it’s changed a bit, and Live Mesh now refers to the product that will control the “mesh” of devices to sync and share, something that was referred to as Horizon. Or something like that. Anyway, it’s Live Mesh for now.

While we’ve got a general idea of how this is all going to work – file synch via RSS shared extensions (which Microsoft is calling Feedsync, and which it placed under the open specifications promise), plus a lot more, we’re sure, we can’t wait to get a real look at what Live Mesh can do.

So we’re going to be bringing you the announcements as they hit the wire next week, and head on down to San Francisco on Thursday to get our hands on, see some demos, and talk to some of our soon to be Live Mesh friends.

We’ll have a lot more next week, but you can study up in the meantime:

LiveSide stories tagged

Microsoft churning out the Ozzie + Mesh PR, so nobody talks about Horizon

Chris — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:38:59 GMT

In case you haven't been following the Microsoft PR Mix08 tour bus, here's the numerous stops they've been making on the subject of Ray Ozzie and Mesh:

The FT churns out a great piece, which you could be forgiven for thinking that Ray Ozzie wrote himself judging by the style and vagueness. Of course he didn't because they actually showed something palpable towards the end, www.mesh.com - "a location where consumers will be able to go to register their devices for the new services and set the levels of information they want to access from different places."
Om Malik turns out a pretty good interview with Ray, though of course the new benchmark is Sarah Lacy so that doesn't necessarily say much. Ray also talks about the enterprise scenario and how Amazon has situated themselves.
Dan Farber talks about FeedSync and how Microsoft is building "a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub."

~~Microsoft PR~~ Dan also mentions what we've been shouting about for a while, that FeedSync is behind all this sharing; "users want to be able to access their data from any device, and for the data to be up-to-date, secure and without duplicate content."

Notice how none of these stories actually talk about what people will do once they have this mesh - remote access? storage? file synchronisation? Mary-Jo Foley filled in some gaps today, talking about Horizon being (amongst other things) a combination of FolderShare and SkyDrive. There's still a lot more to Horizon though, hence the almost deafening amount of noise being drummed up about mesh.

And to think not one of those people talking about mesh actually bothered to question why the url went to preview.mshorizon.com. I guess we'll just have to shout a little louder next time.

Microsoft places FeedSync under Open Specifications Promise

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:52:26 GMT

Received a nice email today from Steven Lees, a member of the CSA Concept Development Team at Microsoft, announcing that Microsoft has placed FeedSync under the Open Specifications Promise. According to Lees from his email:

"As I think I mentioned at Mix n Mash, we’re very interested in having many independent implementations of FeedSync. The spec itself is under a Creative Commons license, and we’ve always said that we want people to have royalty-free use of the spec as well. Because I’ve heard some general questions from people about spec licensing, and because we’ve filed patents on technology innovations related to FeedSync, we wanted to make the royalty free message even more clear, so we’ve placed the FeedSync spec under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise."

Basically, the Open Specifications Promise is an even more open specification than Creative Commons. From the Microsoft.com page:

The Open Specification Promise is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement specifications through a simplified method of sharing of technical assets, while recognizing the legitimacy of intellectual property.

...

Q: Why did Microsoft take this approach?

A: It was a simple, clear way, after looking at many different licensing approaches, to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers that the specification(s) could be used for free, easily, now and forever.

Q: How does the Open Specification Promise work? Do I have to do anything in order to get the benefit of this OSP?

A: No one needs to sign anything or even reference anything. Anyone is free to implement the specification(s), as they wish and do not need to make any mention of or reference to Microsoft. Anyone can use or implement these specification(s) with their technology, code, solution, etc. You must agree to the terms in order to benefit from the promise; however, you do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate your agreement to Microsoft.

You can read more about FeedSync, and the Open Specifications Promise, at these locations:

FeedSync news blog http://blogs.msdn.com/feedsync

Steven Lees' MSDN blog http://blogs.msdn.com/stevenlees

FeedSync site http://feedsync.org

Open Specifications Promise Page at Microsoft.com http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

Mix n Mash: on Mix08, Feedsync, Silverlight, and an hour with Bill Gates

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:08:00 GMT

LiveSide is an enthusiasts website. We follow Windows Live because we're intrigued by the promise of the software and services, and we're honored to have developed a following and a reputation as a reliable source of news about Windows Live. Most of the rewards we get are not monetary (by any means), but we're excited to watch our traffic steadily grow, thankful for the links we get from influential tech sites, and amazed, really, that we recently climbed as high as #30 on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

However our invitation to today's Mix n Mash event, held at the Executive Briefing Center on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, has been a highpoint, to say the least. LiveSide was invited, along with 8 other bloggers and web developers, to spend the day talking about Microsoft and more, concluding with an hour long conversation with Bill Gates.

While much of the day was not Windows Live specific (Chris has already posted on Feedsync, which was the focus of one presentation), we spent a very interesting day, starting with a 2 hour conversation about Silverlight with Scott Guthrie, a hands on demo of Surface and a demo of Popfly, a brief conceptual talk about Feedsync, an overview of adCenter Gatineau with some early looks at Beta 2 (expected sometime in early 2008), and then on to our hour with Bill Gates.

Here's the list of attendees:

Kip Kniskern – www.liveside.net staff writer

Molly Holzschlag – www.molly.com IE Standards

Jesse Warden – www.jessewarden.com Flash developer

Jonathan Snook – www.snook.ca/jonathan Web designer

Keith Peters – www.bit-101.com Flash developer

Kelly Goto – www.gotomobile.com Goto Media, Goto Mobile

Erik Natzke – http://jot.eriknatzke.com Flash developer

Julie Lerman – www.thedatafarm.com/blog Developer

Rob Howard – http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward CEO, Telligent Systems (maker of Community Server)

We were not able to take individual pictures of Bill, or post recordings of the event, but a transcript of the conversation will be released tomorrow, along with a picture of us with the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, which of course we will post with commentary. I asked Bill how he thought Windows Live was doing, and while there were no surprises in his answer, LiveSide still asked Bill Gates a Windows Live question, and he answered, and how cool is that?

The event was planned as a way to get conversations started about Mix08. We talked to Scott Guthrie about how Mix is becoming a platform for announcements, and when asked by Julie Lerman whether there would be anything at Mix08 that had never been disclosed before, any new technology, Scott said "yes". Later, during the Bill Gates question and answer period, when Molly Holzschlag asked Bill about Internet Explorer 8, one of the Microsoft employees clarified a discussion on when IE 8 would be discussed, saying "there will be disclosures on IE8 during the Mix08 timeframe". We were planning to go to Mix08 anyway (already booked hotel and airfare) but as each of the attendees was presented a pass to attend the conference in Las Vegas in March 2008, we might not need to wash dishes at the Las Vegas Convention Center to be able to afford the conference ;).

We'll be posting more about some of these technologies, and more about Mix soon (want to have the official transcript in hand before attempting to quote anything Bill Gates said). Been kind of a whirlwind of a day, but one that will be long remembered

Microsoft launches FeedSync for data synchronization via feeds - previously known as SSE

Chris — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 07:33:00 GMT

Today at the Mix'n'Match conference taking place in Redmond, Microsoft announced a new Windows Live service that enables the sharing of data through standard web feeds such as RSS and Atom: FeedSync. The specification is now available to developers from http://www.feedsync.org/ under a Creative Commons License.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions (or SSE), the specification has evolved, from an idea first put forward by Ray Ozzie, through discussions between Microsoft and the SSE online community. What makes the FeedSync specification useful is that it as well as enabling data inputs from multiple devices/locations at the same time, it is designed to resolve any conflicts that may come about as a result.

For example, imagine if Windows Live Calendar beta offered FeedSync capabilities. Users would then be able to subscribe to their own RSS feed, and if they so wished, ammend appointments simply by editing the feed. Of course this would require a FeedSync client, something not yet available, but it would seem like a good use of the technology.

For those wishing to test out SSE, you can do so over at Live Labs. We've got a test feed of our own, though we don't really know what to do with it at the moment - that's early adoption for you. Permission for the feed can be set based on Live IDs for both reading and editing, though at the moment there is no contacts picker, just the manual entry of email address. Other things to note are that it displays your Live ID alias in the feed, and that deleted items don't seem to get removed.

If you're wondering how we got the pictures in our feed, its because we previously played around with Windows Live PhotoZoom Alpha, and so this account has some options our other accounts don't. From this it seems as though there may be the ability to embed Silverlight Streaming applications in the future, but that may be a leap of logic too far for this v1.0 spec & demo. It is worth noting though that both PhotoZoom and FeedSync/SSE are products of the Ray Ozzie Concept Development Team.