Back at MIX, the Live Platform Services team announced a new standard APP-based protocol for accessing your Live data, and at Web 2.0 the Live Mesh team has announced plans to extend that API with synchronization-ready access to data, devices, application and activity feeds. Ori Amiga shows a number of demos showing the native Mesh feeds, WPF applications using Mesh, a Silverlight client that supports working on and offline, a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh, a Mac client that sends photos to Live Mesh and even LINQ queries over Mesh objects.
Programming the Mesh
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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“Silverlight client that supports working on and OFFLINE” – really?? I think I heard Moonlight does this but are you sure Silverlight can? Great news if this is correct.
1. When your boss comes in to yell at you, you bend over backwards in a slow, ultra-realistic manner, thus dodging the criticism.
2. You perform great spiral leg kicks in the cafeteria – you rarely have to wait in line.
3. You have your co-workers convinced that the zit on the back of your neck is actually a computer peripheral port.
4. Your code consists of mostly random numbers, which is quite amazing for a VB application.
5. You haven’t actually engaged in a gun battle at a bank, but you have been a little snippy to some of the tellers.
6. After fighting off evil villains, and making mad passionate love to a beautiful woman, you also suddenly wake up in a dark apartment filled with computers.
7. You receive secret messages on your computer screen that appear to be talking directly to you – such as “Click here for a free Virus scan, your computer may be compromised!”
8. In the morning, you’re pretty sure you need to take the blue pill, but you can’t remember if it is supposed to be with food.
9. Your code comments sound very much like prophetic utterances.
10. Every time you talk to your girl friend on the phone, you’re pretty sure you soul is being sucked into another dimension
It is a very, very good idea, and it is easy to come up with really cool things to do with it. The problem is that where is the guarantee that it will be there in 5 years? After CardSpaces, I had thought MS had learned something from the Passport fiasco, but this makes me wonder. You have to have a pretty compelling reason nowadays to host your production hardware yourself, there are so many benefits to outsourcing to a third party at this point. I could see the same thing happening with services.
Identity platforms are a great idea, but noone is going to buy into a web service that is completely controlled by MS. For the same reason, this SOA platform needs to go the way of cardspace. Productize the platform itself, and set yourself up as the primary provider, and youll make a mint.
LiveID does support federated authentication, so you could use the service while authenticating against your own identity provider. That requires you to get a partner agreement to setup. Whether they can enable this for individuals, say via Information Cards and their integration with OpenID STS is a good question.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287610.aspx
Of course, you’re also free to use the same protocols to create your own mesh.
http://www.clariusconsulting.net/blogs/kzu/archive/2008/04/24/61728…