Today, I recieved 5 invites from Microsoft so I could some friends involved in the beta process (similiar to GMail). Anyways, it was nice because it gave me the ability to test some of the p2p features, such as Music Mix, games and shared folders.

Games work, but I think there is a defect with the size of the message window. It becomes really wide, and resizing it doesn't really work.

The Music Mix works, installs the .NET components, but, is VERY beta. After several attempts to get it to work, me and a co-worker couldn't get it going. For some reason I kept getting this weird message telling me I couldn't add tracks over 20MB, even though they were like 3 or 4MB. Very disappointing, as that has real potential. For instance, me and Ryan have a STD (Song of the Day). Sometimes they are obscure, and I can't find them on Rhapsody and he doesn't have a copy of them, etc. This would allow us to share our Song of the Day with each other, without having to track the song down. Hopefully they will get it working soon, I think it's a great idea!

Now, the most frightening of the bunch was the Shared Folder idea. It works, and I didn't notice any defects right off the bat, however there is a real security concern. In fact, I have disabled it and will NOT be using it. For those that don't know, Shared Folders basically creates a folder for each user you want to set one up with. Anything I put into the folder will be synced to the other contacts computer while we are both online and vice versa. Everything is kept in sync at all times. Now, one good thing is that in order to create a shared folder someone sends the other person an invite, but once accepted, there is NO limit as to how much you can sync to your contacts computer; well the limit is the amount of free harddrive space. Somehow I just see this as a really bad idea. It would be interesting to see if a worm could be crafted to initiate a sync filling your contacts harddrive and propagating to other contacts; just sounds like it could be bad. Hopefully they will add a max folder size setting to that feature.

That's all I got for now. Maybe I'll get a chance to do some more digging. I started playing with a resource editor yesterday to see about removing the ads at the bottom of the chat windows, and the video/ad stuff from the bottom of the contact list. If I figure that out, I'll post it.