Forget Waiting, I’ve Got Your Mesh Right Here

April 28th, 2008 | Published in Microsoft | 1 Comment

I said you had until Tuesday at midnight. I lied. I have plenty of comments now left by people looking for Mesh invites, so I may as well give them out now.

Deciding Who Won

This was a tough decision. I only have five invites, so who can I say is worthy of them? I wanted to be picky and not just hand them out like candy since they are so scarce. I wanted the people who received them to really want to test and run Mesh and also have use for it. Like I said before, if you just want five GBs of online storage, use SkyDrive. Mesh is all about the sync. (It’s actually about MUCH, MUCH more, but for now, it’s about the sync).

Now, I did enjoy my Twitter debate with krishnan, and while I understand nikan’s point about convincing the non-believers, I decided to give Mesh to the full on Kool-Aid drinkers who are not jaded and skeptical, but are excited to play with this new technology.

There will be plenty of time later to put Mesh through its paces…believe me when I tell you that this is barely scratching the surface of Mesh. S, for right now, I just wanted to award the invites to people who sounded like they really, really, really wanted it.

Here are the top 5 I’ve chosen (and why):

Ashish Mohta thinks Microsoft is "changing the way of the web." Plus he was the first to comment. Points!
Phil dug Groove back in the day and is a fan of cloud computing.
Shawn has 4 computers, 3 of which run Vista so he can really put Mesh through its paces. He has also participated in Microsoft betas in the past, so is familiar with providing feedback to the devs. Plus, he’s a tech news podcaster, so he will have the ability to talk about Mesh in the tech community.
Chuckpalm said he’s been waiting for something like Mesh for years. He’s also a podcaster, which again meets my other requirement about being vocal. (I don’t need to be on your podcast, though - bribes are not accepted - but I appreciate the enthusiasm.)
Alpesh was looking for a master sync for his various devices and participates in the SharePoint community.

Runners Up:

If you weren’t in the top five, you were either a hater (love you guys!) or just darned unfortunate.

Perry, close but no banana. You weren’t quite as enthusiastic, but you did say you have four computers and a Windows Mobile device, so you could really benefit from using Mesh. You will also be ready when mobile support is announced in the near future, which will be interesting. I was *this* close to giving the invite to you, but the others have the added benefit of being tech community participants, which was one of my requests. However, I’m going to encourage my winners here to please send you one of their invites. (Can someone please volunteer for that?)

Also, Vijay - man, you made it tough. As much as I would love to give out Mesh to someone who wants to prove Vlad wrong, I feel that some of these guys made a better overall case as to why they wanted to test out Mesh. But again, winners, please consider giving one of your invites to Vijay. Because proving Vlad wrong would be awesome.

Runners up, you should also know that if anyone doesn’t claim their Mesh invite, you’ll win by default.

Claim Your Invite:

Winners! To claim your Mesh invite, please email me or comment here with your email address you want the invite sent to.

My email is sarahperez (AT) gmail (DOT) com.