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Microsoft Live Mesh open to more

Company says that folks in Canada, India, and Ireland can now take part in the file synchronization service without an invitation.

Ina Fried Former Staff writer, CNET News
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Ina Fried
2 min read

Microsoft's Live Mesh hasn't officially expanded to include Macs just yet, but the software maker has said that folks in more countries can now take part without having to wait for an invitation.

In a blog posting, Microsoft announced that folks in Canada, India, and Ireland can now join. Microsoft had already opened things up in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Live Mesh is intended to be a service, over time, that allows cloud-based applications to have desktop components and takes desktop applications into the cloud as well as allowing synchronization among many different devices. For now, though, Live Mesh is primarily a means of synchronizing data across multiple computers.

Several times a link has popped up on Microsoft's site for an early Mac version of the Live Mesh client, although Microsoft has promptly taken down the public links.

Although folks in Canada, India, and Ireland don't need an invite, Microsoft said that there is still a cap for each geography, so those interested might not want to dally too long. The company is expected to broaden testing of Live Mesh ahead of its October Professional Developers Conference, with the service expected to expand to include new features at that point.

The Live Mesh team also posted an interesting blog last week on some of the limits in the current service. For example, individual files can be no larger than 2GB, while the size of all contents in a Live Folder can be up to 10GB. (There's still a 5GB limit for how much data can be stored in the cloud-based Live Desktop.)