This just in from BBC News' Technology facet, reporting from the Web 2.0 Conference: Developers question Mesh openness.
The company's new service, that will synch all of a user's devices and applications to produce a seamless framework, was unveiled at Web 2.0.
Microsoft has said the service will use open standards and be rolled out to Windows machines, Macs and mobiles.
But developers at the conference said they needed more detail about openness.
"I have just seen the cookie cutter slide show, " says start up entrepreneur Ola Agayi "and it has promise but I haven't had the chance to play around with it. It's certainly an interesting concept."
Microsoft Live Mesh is the realization of some work Microsoft Research has been doing on wireless mesh networks:
Researchers in Microsoft Research Redmond, Cambridge, and Silicon Valley are working to create wireless technologies that allow neighbors to connect their home networks together. There are many advantages to enabling such connectivity and forming a community mesh network. For example, when enough neighbors cooperate and forward each others packets, they do not need to individually install an Internet "tap" (gateway) but instead can share faster, cost-effective Internet access via gateways that are distributed in their neighborhood. Packets dynamically find a route, hopping from one neighbor's node to another to reach the Internet through one of these gateways. Another advantage is that neighbors can cooperatively deploy backup technology and never have to worry about losing information due to a catastrophic disk failure. A third advantage is that this technology allows bits created locally to be used locally without having to go through a service provider and the Internet. Neighborhood community networks allow faster and easier dissemination of cached information that is relevant to the local community.
Exciting stuff. Microsoft does nothing altruistically, surrendering that domain to the Gates Foundation. So the question is, is Live Mesh going to be as open as Microsoft says, or is it MS's latest attempt to own the Web? Stay tuned, more news at 11...
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