Meshing the Web together
37signals’ philosophy to their apps is very similar to the model of UNIX shell commands, and makes it obvious to me that Web 3.0 will be all about piping web applications together—and those apps that become too closed off will be the ones that get left behind.
It looks like Live Mesh might finally kick this Web 3.0 thing off.
Live Mesh is a new Microsoft framework for cloud computing on the internet, providing tools for sharing data between devices and protocols for accessing data without needing to know the underlying providers. It appears to be, in many ways, a “meshing” of feeds that the services publish with synchronization data binding them all together so the platform can modify and republish as need… but much, more powerful in practice.
A few weeks ago, Loic Le Meur blogged about how he wished his social map lived on his blog. Something like Live Mesh would be able to link Facebook content with blog content without there necessarily being an original that controls a number of copies. They would both be equal and after synchronization, only the sync identification could be considered “master” data. (The question is, of course, is who owns that sync data — something I haven’t uncovered from the Live Mesh site yet, but damn, wouldn’t it be amazing if they’d figured out how to make that decentralized as well?)
But what’s most interesting is that this seems to be the first child of Microsoft’s new position of cross-compatibility on internet, and they have promised Live Mesh will be platform-independent.
Private betas are happening now. I can’t wait to hear the first reports. A demo video (using Silverlight sigh) can be found on the site’s Developer page. Not only does it demo photo data being shared over Live Mesh, but complete applications, both live in the browser and saved locally (in a Google Gears-ish manner).
