Late yesterday, Microsoft quietly opened up the Live Mesh Technical Preview to most anyone in the United States—less than a week after Apple launched MobileMe. Coincidence? Yeah, right. International users can join, too, simply by changing their Windows region and language to U.S.-English.
The announcement came on the Live Mesh forum, rather than the Live Mesh blog, which is where I would have looked for it. I suppose that broadening the Tech Preview without really telling many people is one way to avoid the kind of scale and service problems MobileMe had during last week"s launch. C`mon, how many people follow the Live Mesh forum? I regularly blog this stuff, and I wasn"t looking there. Thanks to LiveSide.net for finding the post. From the forum post: "The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!"