Live Mesh: my first impressions.

After having received an invite for Live Mesh and installed the software I played with the technical preview. Here is what I noted on the weeks I tried Live Mesh instead of studying for my mid-term exams.

I'm going to analyze Live Mesh component by component and then to give an impression about the whole technical preview.

Web Desktop: you can put your files in a web directory and share it with your friends. Both you and your fiends will have the files synchronized into the devices with Live Mesh Client installed. Frankly I can't understand the difference between this service and Windows Live SkyDrive that offers nearly the same things. SkyDrive with a sync client (As Live Mesh Client is) would have been a perfect Web Desktop without the need to make this new service. Since SkyDrive is also a file repository I'd like to prefer it but I think I'm going to use Web Desktop in order to exploit the client. Another time seems that teams in Redmond don't know what another team does.

Desktop client: to install it I had to change my system locale to English US and date in the US format as described by Is started something. The setup was painless on Vista and XP. Everything worked perfectly and the shell integration is good. To share a folder I had just to right-click it and add to Live Mesh. When I open a shared folder I get all the information about last files added or modified in a dedicated panel. The client works perfectly and it is easy enough even for beginners. Desktop Client is definitely a good software.

Other clients: is planned to support also Macs and Phones but aren't not implemented yet, so I have to leave this space blank. Probably since I don't have a Mac nor a Windows Mobile Phone I would have to leave it blank even in the case I could try this feature :-)

My first impression is quite good, the software although is only a Tech Preview works perfectly and now I can access my shared data from every PC connected to Internet and I can also have my files sync' ed on my PCs.

I think that Live Mesh is a great thing but still isn't enough. How can I read and modify my files while I'm using Web Desktop? I think that some Silverlight or AJAX web application would be really useful, otherwise Live Mesh is only a file repository with data synchronization that isn't exactly the killer application I was expecting.