Meshing the Common Feed List

Last week I blogged a little bit about a new cloud syncing product called Live Mesh.  I mentioned how in its current incarnation it really only serves as a file syncing and sharing tool, but in the future it will have an open API that will allow programmers to add application specific data to the system instead of whole files.  I concluded with a short wish list of programs that might take advantage of this API which included a cloud synced RSS feed list.  Well, I was playing around with this the other night, and figured out that this can already be done with just the file-based Mesh.

Quick Background:  with IE7, Microsoft introduced what is known as the Common Feed List within Windows.  When you click on the little orange RSS icon in IE and subscribe to a feed, it gets added into a system wide collection of feeds.  There is a background service that keeps all of these feeds up to date.  The feeds are then visible to any application on the system that wants to interact with them.  Right now, FeedDemon and RSS Bandit interact with the Common Feed List as well as IE, Outlook and Live Mail.  So, as far as offline feed readers go, the Common Feed List is a pretty good idea.  What I would like to do is push that list up into the cloud, and allow me to access it from any computer I’m at.  I’m not talking about just an OPML file of feeds that I’m subscribed to, but instead it’s a full version of the CFL, including a read and unread marking on all entries.  So far, I think I’ve got a working solution.

In Vista, and Feed List is stored in

C:\Users\$USERNAME$\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

and, in XP it is in

C:\Documents and Settings\$USERNAME$\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Feeds

I just added that folder to Mesh and synced it to that location on all of my other machines.  It seems to work like a charm.  While Google Reader is probably a better solution to all of this, I still sort of like this set up.  You must be careful to allow Live Mesh to update before the Common Feed List does, or your read/write tags will get a little messed up.

[UPDATE]

I’ve been running this set for about a week or two now and I can say for sure that it does work, however it will clutter your Recycle Bin with .feed-ms files.  Why?  I cannot explain…

Making it Mesh

Microsoft has a series of lectures on campus called The Breakfast Series where guest speakers will give a presentation about current products, technologies, or anything really relevant to the company.  This week’s was about Live Mesh and I thought it was a really interesting product, so I wanted to share it with you all.

As everyone should have noticed by now, computing is moving away from a desktop centric model, to a cloud (Internet) based system.  Microsoft has been trying for the last few years to figure exactly how they plan to adapt their products to incorporate more web based services.  They have numerous ventures into this arena, but nothing complete and cohesive.  Live Mesh really seems like it is their final solution. 

Basically, the idea with Mesh is to have a central system for synchronizing programs, data, and settings across multiple machines, devices, and web storage.  Sure, products like this have been done before.  In fact, I can think of two separate tools for this already made by Microsoft.  What separates Mesh from the other tools is it’s broad scope and extensibility.  Mesh isn’t design to simply be an application that syncs files, it is supposed to be a platform the provides syncing as simple service for applications to build on.

By the time this reaches beta testing it will run on many different devices.  XP, Vista, OSX, WinMobile, and some WAP enabled devices should all have a version of the client.  The demo shown during the presentation showed a person taking a picture with their smart phone, and it was immediately delivered to the home pc, as well as someone’s laptop who was traveling.   I thought it was kind of neat.

Like I said earlier, the real purpose of Mesh isn’t simply to share files, but rather to expose data syncing and cloud functionality to applications.  There will be an API for developers to use to allow their programs to sync what ever they want and however they want to the Mesh system.  From what was demoed, the API looked very simple and straight-forward.  I believed they had a plug in for Firefox that would add FF bookmarks to the Mesh.  This sort of system seems like a good solution because it allows the application developer add cloud based data portability without dealing with the complicated nature of it.  It will be interesting to see how this system is accepted by the community and how many applications will take advantage of it.  I also wonder how it will be used inside of Microsoft.  I would like to see something like Outlook syncing the contents of your inbox into this, or maybe the Common Feed List keeping a global synced feed list.

Currently, Mesh is dogfooding inside MS and there is an CTP that you can register for.  It took about a week for me to get accepted into the CTP.  There should be a public beta coming in the next couple of months, so keep an eye out for it, it’s going to be pretty cool.