There's more than one way to mesh

On April 15, startup Syncplicity, was hatched. Syncplicity's management team includes a number of former (and near-former) Softies -- including Steven Hazel, a former employee of FolderShare.

Microsoft acquired FolderShare, a file-sync vendor, from ByteTaxi in 2005 and recently updated the service for the first time in months. FolderShare is considered by many to be at least one of the precursors to Live Mesh, Microsoft's big-picture file/cloud sync service due to premiere next week at the Web 2.0 conference.

Hazel, a Bay Area entrepreneur, is likely to be named an advisor to Syncplicity. I had a chance to ask him a few questions, via e-mail, about the file-sync space. I've edited our exchange for clarity and brevity.

MJF: How long were you at Foldershare and what did you do there?

Hazel: I was with FolderShare for about 9 months, starting shortly after it was founded and continuing through the initial release. I worked as a software engineer under (FolderShare founder) Tom Kleinpeter, building the client, the back-end servers, and parts of the web front-end.  (By the way, Tom has an excellent blog about programming and startups at www.spiteful.com.)  I left before the acquisition by Microsoft.

MJF: Talk about your involvement with Syncplicity. What will they do and how will it differ with what Foldershare does? Are any other tech companies investors in or partners of Syncplicity?

Hazel: The Syncplicity folks are still working on getting their board of advisers set up, but I'm likely to become an adviser.  Syncplicity is a next-generation file synchronization service: it integrates with online backup, and they've put a lot of thought into how to make the whole thing more intuitive.

(MJF note: Syncplicity includes Google Docs integration.)

MJF: What, in your opinion, made Foldershare unique and interesting enough for Microsoft to buy the company? Do you feel it filled a hole in Microsoft's line-up that the company needed plugged? Hazel: FolderShare was, as far as I know, the first product to do file synchronization rather than just file sharing.  Because synchronization is more automatic than file sharing, it provides a simpler experience, somewhat like shared folders on your LAN.  Another point for FolderShare is that it provides web access to your files, so despite being basically a P2P application, it's useful even on a borrowed laptop where you don't have any software installed.

MJF: I've seen some users claim that FolderShare and Groove, another of Microsoft's acquisitions, could be used to achieve the same results. Your thoughts? Hazel: I haven't used Groove, so I can't really comment on its capabilities. It seems to me that Microsoft has a lot of products with overlapping features in this area: SharePoint, Groove, FolderShare, and SkyDrive. I feel like maybe they should be one or two products instead of four.

MJF: Foldershare is supposedly a precursor to the mesh architecture/synchronization services Ray Ozzie described at Mix. In your words, could you explain how Foldershare fits in with mesh? Will mesh supersede (and replace) Foldershare? Hazel: Honestly, I can't figure out what the heck those guys are talking about.

MJF: Do you think Skydrive and Foldershare are natural complements? I see lots of folks in the public online Foldershare forums asking for Microsoft to bridge these two technologies. Hazel: Absolutely, these features belong together. Cloud storage like SkyDrive not only provides an off-site backup, it has the potential to improve the quality of synchronization services.  File transfers with an intermediate storage clould are more reliable, and can be faster than pure P2P synchronization.  And once your files are available online, synchronization services tend to provide a simpler user experience for sharing them between computers.

There's a lot happening right now with products that integrate these feature sets.  This is one area where new competitors like Syncplicity and DropBox have FolderShare beat.  They're making real progress with new ideas on top of a combined sync and cloud storage platform. MJF: Other points about synchronization services and strategies that you feel market watchers and industry players don't quite grok that are worth noting?

Hazel: Sync and backup need to be extremely simple to use. I'm not sure any of the existing products have really accomplished that yet, but obviously I feel like Syncplicity has the right focus. Also, these services are partly web-based, and they should be taking better advantage of that.  I'd like to see more innovation around collaboration and socially-networked features.