Microsoft last night introduced a new service called Live Mesh. After reading a half dozen summaries of the service (none of which had very concrete information), I concluded that Live Mesh is an advanced synchronization tool that does pretty much what Windows Live Foldershare has been accomplishing on my PC for the last two years. Using Foldershare I create one folder on my office computer called “Sync” - then on each of my remote computers Foldershare automatically synchronizes the contents of the folder (and all subfolders). It’s very cool - BUT - I also use Google Apps (documents and spreadsheets) - which don’t require any of this because all data is saved on the web and accessible from any Internet connected computer. This is where Microsoft is getting desperate to close the gap and protect their legacy desktop software. Will Live Mesh be worth the wait? It’s hard to say but you can get in line to test it - and I’ll show you where to sign up.

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Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application that takes the content from your FriendFeed account and brings it offline to your desktop. Are you asking “what’s Friendfeed?” Keep reading for the scoop.
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I write for a couple of different sites. Including this one, I write or have written for CompuServe/AOL, Pocket PC Thoughts, Lockergnome, The Gadgeteer, CMPNet’s File Mine, WUGNET: The Windows User’s Group Network, and Gear Diary. Honestly, life is all sunshine and daisies when the site is up and your backup app is working.  However, when things go south, and you find out that your data is gone due to some sort of corruption or backup problem, life can get very complicated.

Gear Diary had a problem like this not too long ago, if you remember.  Judie, the site owner, ran around like a nut trying to work with the hosting company to get things turned around.  Some things went well, but others did not, and we had to rebuild the site from scratch.

Gear Diary is a WordPress enabled site, so many team members use the online WYSIWYG editor to create and edit content. It saves drafts, allows you to upload (and even watermark) graphics/pictures, and is, for all intent and purposes, an online word processor, much like Google Docs.  When the site went belly up, most of the content headed south the border as well.  Most team members had not saved a local copy of their work…which got me thinking…

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Earlier tonight Wayne and I tested out a new chat system that we hoped to use for a team meeting this weekend. The program, HuddleChat, worked perfectly and we ended our talk confident that it would do exactly what we needed.

Tonight, when I went back in to take a look and see about sending invites to the team, I discovered the following message:

Well alrighty then. Back to the drawing board… :eyeroll:

Update: found a little more info on the subject.

Once again, the Gear Diary Team invites you to listen in behind the scenes, while we talk about social networking. We also invite you to continue the conversation in the comments section…

Wayne: Isn’t it about time for a post on the use of Twitter? I see Judie and Joel on there. Anyone else? I find that FriendFeed is a pretty useful tool to keep up on what people are doing. I think techmeme overhyped it a little, but I enjoy seeing in one place what people are writing about, and especially when they post photos and YouTubes.

Do you think this is a passing fad? A lot of this seems pretty “early adopterish”. I know the blogging kings are all over it — but I’m not sure if it has “legs” beyond these hardcore folks that are connected 24×7 to a computer and more open to these faddish ideas.

Will the general public put up with what to many might be an invasion of privacy? Don’t know the answer.

I’m finding that it’s almost a replacement for social bookmark sites like Digg or Delicious, since you are filtering out people who you don’t know and other spammy submissions. It’s also a great way to track favorite writers and online friends.

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Wayne: I’m not sure if this will work for everyone or if it’s just allowing me in because I’m already into the Evernote beta (I think it’s an open URL because one of my friends was able to download directly). UPDATE: Some users are not able to get into the beta via the link shown at the end of this post - if you have trouble - leave a note in the comments and I’ll forward you an invite from my account.

Instead of applying for the Evernote Beta (which is just a marketing gimmick imho) — keep reading and I have a link that I found which seems to get you into the beta without having to wait for an invite.

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