I like living in interesting times and I don't believe that there has been a more interesting time than right now.
Some people think that the internet has arrived and is mainstream, but we haven't seen nothing yet. There will come a day where we view the dot com boom of the 90s as a quaintly as we view the Model T today.
I can only guess at what the future will look like, but my guess is that having a computer at home with your files on it, or your music on it, or your pictures on it, will be a thing of the past.
Now to a certain extent this exists today in various forms. You can share pictures with family and friends through Picasa and similar sites. You can also pay sites like Amazon or Microsoft to backup your other data outside of your home. You can even share video at places like YouTube.
Unfortunately, all of these services only provide the barest hint of what I'm talking about. For one, none of them actually do everything that you need them to do. For another, they either downgrade the quality of media that you are trying to share or store your data, but don't make it readily available to you.
Live Mesh provides a hint at what I think the future is actually going to look like. In its current form it is very simple, providing the barest of features. But even in that form it is quite powerful and in my opinion the biggest thing to come to the internet since Mosaic.
Via this glimpse into the future you can see how all of your data will be available to you anywhere that you can get an internet connection. You can synchronize the data offline, share it with friends & family. This limited beta also provides the capability to remote control any of your computers. They promise that the client will be available to Mac and mobile devices, I hope that they also extend it to Linux and non-MS mobile devices like iPhone and BlackBerry so that the concept of anytime, anywhere, from any device can truly be realized.
You can also imagine how this could be extended to create photo albums, create personalized radio stations or video sites - without the inconvenience of limited quality. You could create calendars and shared contacts. You could store ebooks and read them from any device, edit your documents from the web. On and on and on. Because it is intended to be a platform, the extent of what can be accomplished is really only limited by the imagination of software designers.
Essentially, I see the need to have 'my' computer to become passe - in reality you will need a computer - because all of your needs will be available in one place, on one site as opposed to the conglomerate of different services that we all use today with data strewn about scores of websites and computers.
These are truly interesting times and technology like Mesh can only make them more interesting.
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