From Frontier days to settling the Wild Wesht 

I've been taking advantage of only the most rudimentary properties of Live Mesh since signing up as part of the Gillmor Gang test group. (Thanks for arranging for the invites, Steve.) So far, it's handy. Later on, I can see lots of possibilities.

Just to get my feet wet, I'm sharing files with myself. I do a fair amount of work from home. So, for instance yesterday afternoon at work, knowing I'd be at home today, I moved some image files for a newsletter into my Live Desktop folder. I can fiddle with them and save them right there in the same folder today, and they'll be waiting for me to FTP them to the web server from that "location" when I'm at the office next week. (I'm saving steps now, but do you spot the steps that could be streamlined with further meshing?)

It reminds me very much of the carefree way I can resave images used on my blog. I use the OPML Editor as my blogging software, which moves files via upstreaming. It's a boon to fiddlers like me. With form-based blogging tools, you put an image on your site, don't quite like the way it looks, mess around with it, resave it, and re-upload it. With upstreaming, you merely resave it because it's in a folder whose changed files are moved to the web server every few seconds.

Marc Canter reminded listeners on a Gillmor Gang podcast on Tuesday that Dave Winer figured out this automatic desktop2cloud thing a decade ago with Radio and Manila based on his Frontier environment. Scan in about 27 minutes.

The free OPML Editor I use is a part of the same family, built by Dave on the now opensourced Frontier kernel. If you've used Dave's TwitterGram service or FlickrFan, you're using the OPML Editor. It's all kinds of things, an outliner, blogging tool -- there's even an instant messaging doodad in there. And you can hook it up to your Word Press blog if you like composing in an outliner.

So what's next? Can I use my meager fake half-developer skillz to make something with Mesh? I don't know yet. But it sure is interesting. It feels very natural and seamless and direct, like the OPML Editor experience. Feels like the way the web is supposed to work.