The wait is finally over - I received my invitation to join Microsoft's Live Mesh Tech Preview! At the last count, there were already over 10,000 beta testers. Once this number grows into the millions, Microsoft’s Mesh will likely become a one stop shop for online file management potentially edging out Google and co.

Live Mesh is a “software-plus-services” platform and experience that enables PCs and other devices to “come alive” by making them aware of each other through the Internet, enabling individuals and organizations to manage, access, and share their files and applications seamlessly on the Web and across their world of devices. Live Mesh includes:

• A platform that defines and models a user’s digital relationships between devices, data, applications, and people—made available to developers through an open data model and protocols.
• A cloud service providing an implementation of the platform hosted in Microsoft data centers.
• Software, a client implementation of the platform that enables local applications to run offline and interact seamlessly with the cloud.
• A platform experience that exposes the key benefits of the platform for bringing together a user’s devices, files and applications, and social graph, with news feeds across all of these.

For more information, go to LiveMesh.com.

For more Live Mesh coverage:

• Read the Live Mesh team blog
• Watch the interview with Ray Ozzie introducing Live Mesh on Channel 9
• Watch an interview with Abolade Gbadegesin on Live Mesh Architecture on Channel 9
• Watch the demo of the Live Mesh application on Channel 10

I have just added my first device to the mesh and plan to start playing around with the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE) via the currently unpublished MeshFX API interface.