Microsoft Live Mesh and .NET Explained

May 6th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

Live MeshToday I came across two articles picking on Microsoft. The first one was published a few days ago, but I missed it because of the title: "Architecture astronauts take over", written by Joel Spolsky. It's actually an effort to explain what Microsoft Live Mesh is all about, something I found difficult when I briefly mentioned the new Microsoft platform at launch a couple of weeks ago. Joel means that the Live Mesh is a creation of "architecture astronauts", the same people who long ago (7 years) crafted the since long forgotten "Hailstorm", an early vision of a cloud of webapps tied together with Windows Passport. Architecture astronauts are recognized in the following way, as Joel writes:

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization. 

Live Mesh is, initially at least, all about synchronization, but there is a greater vision, as Joel writes:

It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop.

I'm sure there are other opinions on Live Mesh, this was a particularly colorful view worth mentioning, anyhow. Another note about Microsoft Live Mesh, it should not be confused with the Open Mesh, as envisioned by Marc Canter in a series of blog posts.

 

.NETThe other article I saw this morning was part two in a series of posts describing a Windows developer's conversion to Mac OS X. This part two is a description of the .NET platform and how it fails to attract top-level or "conscientious" developers. Two basic problems with the .NET platform is that it 1. Tries to be the single tool for all levels of developers, from the casual business analyst to the top-notch developer, and 2. The never-ending backwards compatibility to Win16 (Windows 3.1, released 1992).

As for myself, I have tried a few times to get acquainted with the .NET platform, but I've always stumbled on the initial tutorials, which map out a detailed path to solve a specific problem, but always fail to provide a deeper understanding of what's really going on. Hopefully, this is a sign that I belong to the upper hierarchy of developers, for whom the .NET platform is not designed ;-). Another obstacle is the vastness of the platform with reportedly some whopping 39 509 types. For me, however, it's not an option to surrender to the Mac OS platform. Hopefully I will be able to remain in the cloud, so that the matter of decision never occurs.

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Twitter Noise, Techmeme and Popfly Games [Best of May '08 #1]

May 5th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

How to define Twitter noise and breaking into Techmeme were among the interesting subjects this week (April 28 - May 4 2008):

  • How to define the Twitter noise ratio, which was highlighted last week, continued to be discussed this week. There are a few related indices, e.g. Stowe Boyd's Conversational Index = (number of tweets / number of replies made by followers), Dave Winer's Twitter Spewage = (number of updates * number of followers) and the Follow factor = (number of following / number of followers). My thought on this, which has also been expressed by others, is that the noise ratio must be based on the number of tweets or updates in a time period of fixed length, e.g. in the past week, not the number of tweets since the user signed up to Twitter. Hopefully I will develop my thoughts on this interesting subject in a forthcoming post.
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  • How to break into Techmeme 100 as a solo blogger was discussed by Hutch Carpenter, who suggested three possibilities: 1. Long Slog (slow and steady), 2. Big Events (e.g. recognition by bigger bloggers), 3. Celebrity (e.g. Marc Andreessen). As for me, I am contented with just showing up on Techmeme, which was accomplished by a big event. Apparently my Microsoft-Yahoo post didn't make it on Techmeme, despite linking to three articles currently on Techmeme. I'm slightly annoyed, wonder what's going on, hmm ...?
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  • Adobe announced the opening up of the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv files).
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  • Robert Scoble thinks that the most interesting page of a FriendFeed user is the discussion page, like http://friendfeed.com/user/discussion. Louis Gray's success on Techmeme can be attributed to his frequent commenting on others' contributions.
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  • YackTrack tracks the conversation around a blog post at disparate sources like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress.
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  • Popfly Game Creator was released in alpha this week, a service based on Microsoft's Silverlight technology. It is aimed at non-programmers, and could possibly be something for my 7-year-old nephew, who is heavily into online flash based games at sites like miniclip. It might be a tad too difficult though, and I think it requires a lot of patience, which he might not have, and then it's the English, which he's used to and interested in, but probably not good enough at. It's worth a try anyway.
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An Independent Yahoo is Good in the Long Run

May 4th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

microsoft-yahoo[Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb expands on my thoughts in this post about the many useful Yahoo apps we can still enjoy.]

I woke up this morning, at the other side of the pond, to the news that Microsoft had walked away from its offer to buy Yahoo. Apparently Microsoft had increased its offer by $4 a share to $33, but Jerry Yang demanded $37 to accept the offer, a price Steve Ballmer considered unjustified, so he instead folded. It seems like Microsoft seriously considered a hostile takeover, but were intimidated by Yahoo's threat to pursue its search advertising deal with Google.

This is not good news for the Yahoo shareholders, who expected to make a few bucks on the deal, and probably is not good for Microsoft, who will continue to linger in the backwater of Web 2.0. For the rest of us, an independent Yahoo, free at least at the moment from the jaws of Microsoft, is good news. We can continue to enjoy services like delicious, flickr and pipes. We can hope for Yahoo's continuous adoption of semantic technologies and other open standards, as well as further opening up of their services through APIs and web services. If just Yahoo survives the foreseen struggle with disgruntled share holders, an important player will remain on the web arena.

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Twitter, Live Mesh and Web 3.0 [Best of April '08 #4]

April 28th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

I'm changing the layout a little of my weekly link blogging. Twitter continues to be on everybody's mind (April 21-27 2008):

  • Louis Gray came up with some interesting number crunching on the "Twitter Noise Ratio", defined as the (total) number of updates for a user divided by the (current) number of followers. Listeners have a noise ratio less than one, "normal" people around one, and megaphones or fire hoses above 5. My ratio is 1, putting me in the normal group, but I will soon become a fire hose unless I get some more followers, which points to one weakness of the definition. Interesting attempt anyhow.
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  • Marshall Kirkpatrick on how RWW uses Twitter for Journalism: Breaking News, Interviews, Quality Assurance and Promotion.
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  • Josh Catone on the history and demise of Web 3.0, with links to my featured articles.
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  • Marshall at the Web 2.0 Expo concludes that APIs and platforms now are ubiquitous and asked around what will come next. Filtering for information overload and Standards and interoperability were a few answers.
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  • Josh on Microsoft's Live Mesh, a data synchronization platform, which launched in private beta to much fanfare, but the confusion around Microsoft's online services remains.
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  • Michael Arrington is now so dependent upon Twitter that despite the service's frequent downtimes, he foresees its dominance to continue.
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An Impression at Techmeme

April 26th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

TechmemeTechmeme Impression

This week was quite extraordinary in my short life as a blogger. A started blogging roughly two months ago, though I have been reading blogs quite intensely for about a year. At the beginning of the week I was practically unknown in the blogosphere and had no incoming links. At the end of the week I was someone and had a few incoming links, whereof some with a very high authority (thanks ReadWriteWeb). I even managed to make a small impression at the high-profile news aggregator Techmeme.

With some hard and intelligent work I will hopefully make a few more hits in the future, though I have currently no ambition to be a full-time blogger. I am convinced though that blogging is an important part of any web related business, for communication, marketing and for maintaining a presence on the web (and in the search engines.)

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