Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Do you share photos on Facebook? What about sharing sharing videos on YouTube? Well thanks to Will Duff, one of our developer interns this past summer, there are now a couple of brand new publish plug-ins for Facebook and YouTube available for download. Both plug-ins enable you to easily share your photos or videos with just a few clicks!"

Facebook is great for connecting with people... over the last two weeks I've "found" two friends I had "lost" years ago. Sharing photos and videos is great too. But uploading those photos or videos isn't as simple as it could be, particularly if you have to find the file you want to upload while still in the web browser. These two new plugins for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live Movie Maker Beta greatly simplify the process. Both plugins allow you to upload photos or video directly to Facebook (photo/video) or YouTube (video only) directly within the tool. I've only tested the Photo Gallery upload to Facebook, but it's as straightforward as it appears. I like it!

"Apparently the shroud of secrecy that surrounds Windows Live and Wave 3 doesn't extend to help files, as our friend Picturepan2 at LiveSino.net discovered as he was snooping around doing some investigative reporting. While Microsoft has maintained that FolderShare would continue on, even in the face of what seems to be redundancy with Live Mesh, those outside the company have been wondering what would become of FolderShare. FolderShare was acquired when Microsoft bought ByteTaxi in 2005, and offers file and folder synchronization between computers with a web interface component. Folder synchronization between Windows and Mac computers is possible. However it does not offer "in the cloud" storage, or work on the FeedSync RSS underpinnings that power Live Mesh (at least in its current configuration)."

Live Sync? Meh. I'm not feeling that name - FolderShare is a descriptive name that Joe Average can understand - it's something that allows you to "share folders". Sync is a geek work that has virtually no meaning in the realm of non-geeks. Names aside, what I really care about is whether or not FolderShare is going to continue to survive. As Live Mesh improves faster and faster, and FolderShare seemingly stays the same, I worry that FolderShare isn't going to be allowed to survive much longer. Of course, if Live Mesh reaches feature parity with FolderShare, it might not matter.

"Microsoft just announced the availability of a number of new and updated online applications in its Windows Live suite: Windows Live Photos, Profiles, People, and Groups. In addition, Microsoft also announced that it will allow its users to integrate content from a large number third-party services, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, Twitter, and Yelp. Microsoft will begin rolling out these new services to U.S. customers in the coming weeks and expects them to be available globally in 54 countries by early 2009."

Starting to look a lot like Facebook. They are pretty wise to allow integration of third party services, but again, something Facebook already has. This is clearly going to be an uphill battle, as most people go to a social networking site that their friends are already on. Speaking from personal experience, I only started using Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal as a result of my friends already using them. Hopefully the competition will bring innovation. I'd like to see them possibly integrate their social networking effort with the Xbox and Zune, then we could really see a deal changer.

"Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 won't include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making, as was done with Windows Vista, CNET News.com has learned. The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others. Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions as optional free downloads. Earlier on Monday, Microsoft had declined to say how it was handling things."

This is risky business for Microsoft. Why? Because there are a lot of Windows users that don't install extra software on thier PC - many people I know use whatever came with their computer, regardless of whether or not there's something better out there for them. Every Apple computer ships with iLife, and now every Windows 7 computer will ship with...nothing? Or perhaps we'll see every OEM select their own email, photo, and video solution - thus creating an even more fragmented PC landscape. That's not a good solution either. I have a slim hope that Microsoft will be able to encourage OEMs to bundle the complete suite of Windows Live products with each computer they ship, or perhaps offer some sort of easy download option...but I still see this as being problematic on a number of levels. What do you think?

"Imagine this. You connect a digital camera to your PC for transferring photos and the software is able to recognize family members and friends in the photos by their faces. Well that’s something new coming in the new release of Windows Live Photo Gallery - it will include a special "Face Recognition" feature where the software will automatically recognize different faces in in your personal pictures and will also let you add those names as tags."

Pretty sweet feature for automatically tagging your photos. From the privacy standpoint, I'm wondering if it will only tag people you have previously identified in your gallery or whether it will be able to tag people in the background who might have already been identified in other photos.

Microsoft has opened up their Live Mesh service to the general public in the form of a "tech preview" which is a nicer way of saying "mostly still beta". I've been using Live Mesh for a couple of months now, and it's a pretty cool service. You set a folder to be "Live Meshed" and not only will it be kept in sync between multiple computers, the contents of the folder will be kept in the cloud (where you have 5 GB of storage). I think there's a lot of potential here, especially since they've stated they'll be targeting mobile devices. I've been dreaming of having my FlexWallet file be pushed to my device when there's a change in it, because connecting my device with my desktop computer is something I just don't do anymore. I was hoping for years that the FolderShare team would release a Windows Mobile client, but they're still struggling to get the service stable, so no joy there. If you have a desktop and a laptop, and haven't checked out Live Mesh yet, you should.

"So at 5 minutes after 9pm, I navigated to www.mesh.com, logged in with my Windows Live ID, and was off and running. First order of business (after accepting the terms), was to add a couple of devices and synch some folders. The download was 1.57mb and installed in less than 2 minutes, by unofficial count. After adding a laptop, I created a folder and, by right clicking on it, transformed it into a Live Mesh folder...Note that once the folder is a Live Mesh Folder, it turns blue (the Live Mesh guys like blue!) So now on to the laptop, where again, I added it to the mesh, and synched the folder I created."



I heard a little bit about Mesh at the recent MVP Summit, but I didn't realize it was going to be going to a limited public beta so quickly - this article has some of the basics. Where does Mesh begin and FolderShare end? I haven't the foggiest idea - they seem like overlapping technologies in many ways. I guess we'll see! There's lots of great speculation in this article as well.

FolderShare is quite likely the best software service (free or paid) that you've never heard of - it's a service that synchronizes two folders. Seems simple right? The devil is always in the details where synchronization is concerned however - and FolderShare gets more of those details right than any similar software I've used. I use FolderShare to keep my Documents, Pictures, Music, and other folders synchronized amongst all my PCs. Between FolderShare and my hosted Exchange account, I can sit down at any of my PCs or laptops and have an updated copy of every file, email, and photo that I have. It's like the ultimate roving desktop scenario, and it works amazingly well. It also works well when you're working remotely, because if I'm working on a document or editing photos on the plane, when I land and establish Internet connectivity, all those updated files are pushed back, securely, to my home PCs. FolderShare has allowed me to mirror my data all over the place and worry less about losing any one PC because they all have the same data. That's powerful stuff.

FolderShare is in my top three applications of all time, and it's fantastic to see Microsoft finally make progress on it. You see, FolderShare was created by a company named Byte Taxi, and I was paying $59.99 a year for their professional-level service. Then Microsoft bought Byte Taxi at the end of 2005 - and nothing changed for over two years other than the service becoming free. By "nothing", I mean exactly that - no real software updates (in fact, some features were removed), no changes to the FolderShare Web site other than a Microsoft logo being slapped up...it was as if the whole project was frozen in carbonite. I'd been fortunate enough to connect with some of the Microsoft team members working on updating FolderShare, so I knew they were doing things behind the scenes, but it's been hard seeing no outward changes. All that's finally changed! Read more...