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so I got an invitation to Microsoft Mesh last night (it pays to stay up late and follow @stevegillmor). in some way Mesh is Microsoft’s answer to offline webapps (think Google Gears, AIR), weaving the fabric that is supposed to connect multiple devices, and applications. in its current rendition (don’t forget, this is labeled ‘Tech Preview’), Mesh sets up a virtual desktop, which is used to synchronize file-folders among different computers and different users (if you wish to collaborate). next to each folder, a small history & message-board is displayed. being Ray Ozzies brainchild, it should be no suprise that this sounds quite a bit like what Groove has been doing for ages.

while you can access mesh through the browser [screenshot above] (and Microsoft obviously has learned a lesson here, since it works flawlessly on Firefox, and also on Mac), the real fun starts after installing the Mesh-software to your local Windows(XP/Vista)-PC. mesh-folders are now transparently included on your local desktop [screenshot below], syncing existing folders to the cloud is only a matter of few clicks. if nothing else, Mesh is a slick way to backup local data to the web (5gbyte for free doesn’t sound too bad, right?).

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when will Microsoft release a free, ad-supported online version of their office-suite? will it be called Office Live? and will it happen before Google’s lightweight office-apps finally include a featureset that will be a sufficient replacement for mainstream-users? a - though quickly altered - blog-post from within Microsoft leads to new speculation at TechCrunch.

Freebase - currently in private beta - is generating some buzz (Tim O’Reilly, John Markoff, N. Carr - who describes Freebase as the first major Web 3.0 app). Freebase is a massively distributed, collaboratively-edited, freely structured database - or, as O’Reilly puts it - a folksonomy-based approach on weaving the Semantic Web:

“But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb [the company that created Freebase] is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.”

now here’s a cool iTunes-plugin: iConcertCal automatically retrieves upcoming events matching your music library and displays them within iTunes. current sources seem to be a bit US-centric, but that could be fixed by mashing with upcoming.org.

going to be released on monday, RatePoint will be adding avatar-rating and social networking features to SecondLife. quite amazing, considering it’s based solely on SL’s scripting language.

37 Signals is joining the growing number of wellknown sites supporting OpenID with their upcoming CRM-tool Highrise.

here’s one for the weekend: another Google-song

fowa2007, day #2 - wifi is still sluggish & expensive.

nothing too breathtaking from Microsoft (Chris Wilson) and Adobe (Mark Anders), though the Flex-demo was kinda intriguing - flash is finally making sense for developers. the CEO (?) of Scrybe gave a short performance-comparison of actionscript 2 vs. 3, which also seemed kinda impressing. He should’ve demo’ed Scrybe though, to really show what Flex/Apollo can do (btw, my Scrybe-beta account still doesnt work ).

check out Twingly, a screensaver (Windows only) done by swedish students which visualizes blog-activity on a rotating globe…

Khoi Vinh (director of design for NYTimes.com) - avoid the “The Siren Call of Web 2.0″ (Web 2.0 - pros can’t get enough, users have no idea what it is!)… good talk on NYTimes’ design approaches & challenges, hopefully slides will be available…

Jonathan Rochelle (Google) - “Google Docs & Spreadsheets - the product name sucks, but at least nobody will be confused”.

Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone) - “thematic consistency - ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields thematically coherent experience when accessed through different devices”. check http://dev.mobi, a developer-community focused on mobile webapps (take their survey and receive a 20 US$ iTunes gift-certificate).

Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP): “I don’t find joy in the process of programming. it’s kinda tedious & hard.”…great, geeky tech-talk. if you’re into performance measurement, check out http_load / valgrind / callgrind / Kcachegrind (prints nice execution-path trees). Rasmus on security: “the web is broken you can all go home now.”

and with these wise words I’m closing this post & and say goodbye fowa 2007 - we’ve had a blast!

if you’re bored of the ever same, sterile user-interfaces of common search engines, you might wanna try out Ms. Dewey, a Microsoft-owned experimental search-frontend to Windows Live Search. being distracted by hi-quality flash-video of librarian Ms. Dewey (played by Janina Gavankar, who - according to Valleywag - has been featuring soft-porn movies in her past ) won’t make search any more efficient, but it’s eyecandy definitely worth watching once!

in what can be described as a precautious concession to the music industry, Microsoft decided to cripple the most interesting feature that might have put their recently released Zune media-player atop of Apples predominant iPod series: the ability to share tracks with other Zune-users over WiFi is restricted to DRMed songs purchased/rented from zune.net. transmitted songs can be played back three times within three days, before finally expiring. legal media without DRM-restrictions (f.e. podcasts) are excluded from WiFi-sharing - a major bummer, and - I guess - a major opportunity missed by Microsoft to own the areas of audio- & video-blogs.

it was only a matter of time until smart hacks allow zune-users to fully utilize the wireless capabilities of their devices. a workaround that popped up at Gizmodo today, allows wireless sharing of any filetype by renaming the files to .jpg. the catch of this ridiculously simple ‘hack’ seems to be, that both sending & receiving Zune have to to the renaming from a connected PC. however, I’m optimistic that when the Zune finally hits europe’s shelves in march 2007, we’ll have plenty of patches to overcome such restricitions…

years after the big search-players agreed on nofollow-directives and robots.txt-controlled exclusions, Danny Sullivan reports that Microsoft & Yahoo have announced to join Google’s sitemap-effort, an XML-protocol allowing webmasters to optimize the crawling of dynamic web-content:

Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.

Photosynth - a Microsoft Labs technology prototype first seen in july - has been released into public preview on the last day of this years web 2.0 summit. the active-x-based software analyzes & arranges numerous pictures of one location in a 3D-space, making pictures browseable in a unique and gorgeous way. the preview is limited to predefined image-sets (expect to see Piazza San Marco or San Pietro like you never did before) and doesn’t support user-uploaded scenarios. nonetheless, recommended eye-candy - unfortunately for internet explorer 6.x/7x only.

with the current hailstorm of news on upcoming web-office initiatives by Google and others, one might easily be tempted to forget about what that particular company in Redmond is going to do about all that. tonight, Marshall Kirkpatrick from TechCrunch (down-to-earth) and Steve Gillmor (way-beyond) both give us an appropriate reality-check about what to expect from Microsoft…

• Office Live (a free communication-service centered around email, calendar & file-storage) is announced to leave beta on november 14th. Gillmor says its dead-on-arrival, and who’s to disagree, since Google’s equivalent has been out for so long now)
• Microsoft announced a longterm partnership with PHP-company Zend today, therefor ultimately validating development-paradigms aside their own .NET-platform
• as of yesterday, there seems to be a free accounting software from Microsoft - Office Accounting Express 2007
• moreover, there’s an article on InfoWorld promising two new services to be launched by mid-november: ‘adManager’ will offer advertisers a single interface to manage ad-campaigns on arbitrary platforms, including Google AdSense, Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft’s own. meanwhile, the ‘Business Contact Manager’ will integrate CRM-services into Office Live

after signing up for Microsoft’s supposed YouTube-competitor soapbox - which is currently still in closed beta - several weeks ago, my account finally got approved today. seems the recent YouTube-aquisition stimulated the soapbox-team to get a move on. buzz among bloggers is increasing, as on10 - another Microsoft-asset - gave away 10.000 invites two days ago. in terms of features, soapbox tries to stay as close as possible to the market-leader, only adding minor improvements like tagging of clips. video-quality seems to be slightly better than we are used to, at least for some movies. quick-jumping to parts of the video not yet downloaded actually works (which is a great plus). interestingly, soapbox uses ActiveX-controls to integrate Windows Media Player for video-streaming when run on Internet Explorer (other browsers rely on the Flash-plugin as usual).

as has been pointed out many times before, the technical challenge in building a YouTube-clone-competitor isn’t that big at all. the real question is if Microsoft will be able to build a community around its social video-service - a community large enough to draw attention and video-uploads from YouTube. leveraging its Live Spaces-community of currently more than 130mio users, I think Microsoft’s position ain’t too bad.

Microsoft just added news-reader functioniality to their technology-preview Microsoft Max. Max basically is a photo-browser & RSS-reader based on the Windows Presentation Foundation. while others are amazed by the admittedly cool user-interface and the newspaper-styled post-summary (see screenshot below), I was disappointed that the development-team didn’t spend more time on the core features of the news-reader itself: subscribed feeds can’t be organized/sorted in any way, clicking a teaser opens the original post in the external browser, posts aren’t marked as read, some feeds (f.e. Scripting News) aren’t processed at all etc.

so currently Max is more about showing of what’s possible in regards to user-interfaces using the Presentation Foundation - which is, no doubt, impressive.