Why .mac is doomed... unless Steve Jobs finds a passion for it at Macworld this January.

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Why .mac is doomed... unless Steve Jobs finds a passion for it at Macworld this January.

Date Created: 28 Dec, 2006, 03:48 PM

Amongst my friends and within the Mac blogosphere, I've been a rather staunch defender of .mac.

I first used its progenitor, iTools, in 2001 after I purchased my second Powerbook, the first generation Titanium 400.

At the time, Apple allowed free webspace of 20MB, and I ended up having multiple accounts totalling more than 100MB in order to make use of iMovie's ability to digitise my DV camera's output into uploadable Quicktime movies.

This allowed me to indulge in my other past-time, Israeli Folk Dance. On these various websites, I could upload dances I had videod myself on location at dance camps across the US and Australia for all to share.

iTools made it so easy to grab those QT files, create some kind of website based on the Apple-supplied homepage templates, and stream them to anyone who had the wherewithal to download Quicktime from Apple's website. And I was able to do this without knowing a thing about HTML or FTPing or the like.

In the years that followed, I think I introduced thousands of people on the Windows platform, whose only media experience was Windows Media Player or Real Player, to the Quicktime experience. This was before the iPod was introduced in late 2001, and way, way before YouTube or GoogleVideo. In recent years, my videos have gone from being encoded as .mov to .mp4 files.

After iTools became .mac and an annual tax was levied, I garnered support from the folk dance community who "adopted" the dances and raised money to pay for the site. By then, others had seen the value of the site for sharing new and old material to keep our shared past-time alive, and so I was sent DVDs and mpegs online to upload.

By August this year, there were nearly 500 Quicktime videos on the one site, which each week without any formal advertising was receiving thousands of hits and streaming downloads.

The site didn't carry any advertising (.mac didn't allow it), nor PayPal donation signs. It existed as a proof-of-concept, labor of love, and service to an international community. You can see what remains of it here.

While at first the small streaming videos were laughed at, when compared in quality to VHS tapes and later DVDs which could be purchased from shopfronts and mail-order from dance suppliers, by 2006 the site had taken on a very strong intenational following, especially in far-flung countries where dancers couldn't easily access or afford paid-for materials.

I tried very hard to only use materials I had produced myself, or had sent to me by reliable sources. However, in late 2006, a complaint was made to Apple alleging I had uploaded material whose copyright belonged to an aggrieved third party. Documents sent to Apple allegedly testified to that ownership, and acting under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Apple removed the one video in question.

A few weeks later, all the videos were removed, inclusive of ones I had taken with my own camera, on allegations that "many" unspecified videos were in breach of one person's copyright.

Since then there has been much discussion between the various parties, but at this stage the site is still down, with the videos removed by Apple's .mac team to a folder on my iDisk inaccessible to the general public. Apple Legal has tried to be fair by showing me how to overturn its actions it was compelled to follow under the DMCA.

In the meantime, the same videos and many others I would ordinarily have accessed and uploaded have begun to make appearances on YouTube, which of course is subject to the same DMCA restrictions as my .mac account.

In essence, the actions of a few have opened a Pandora's box of copyright issues, such that those who allege ownership are finding they are playing a side-show game of "whack-a-mole" in their attempts to shut down the next site that uploads videos allegedly breaching copyright.

Indeed, matters are worse than that since some angered by the closing of my site have purposely digitised copyright videos and uploaded them, thereby eating into legitimate revenue from expected sales.

During all this, many supporters who had come to rely on my website implored me to upload them to YouTube, but the terms of agreement seemed harsh to me, and the ability to search and locate videos rather ineffectual.

For me, .mac was principally about the sharing of videos, and deriving a sense of community. Earlier this year, .mac attempted a form of social networking by setting up Groups, but it is so weak and restrictive that when I took the idea of taking my local Mac User group on line with .mac it was roundly turned down in favour of the existing Yahoo discussion list.

.mac could have done so much more for Mac owners, but its interminable slowness and lack of feedback about what it's doing (uploading files gives no real-time indication of progress), means it gets used less and less, as alternatives in the social networking community become available.

My guess is the .mac is not the Apple of Steve Jobs' eye. It doesn't get his personal attention, and while it brings in some money each year, it doesn't excite Steve as much as iLife or MacBooks or iPods. It's a neglected, almost vestigial "service" which has huge potential in this new Web 2.0 era of sharing.

In essence, .mac could have been YouTube if someone had nurtured it. Or YouTube could have become .mac's replacement. I was doing YouTube stuff with it five years ago, with a basic Powerbook and Sony DV. How is it that no one in Apple either saw what was on the horizon, or didn't have the wherewithal to convince Steve of how the future could unfold and Apple's central role in it?

To my eye, .mac is to Steve Jobs what the Internet was to Bill Gates. Both didn't know what they had until it was too late, ignoring the signs that others could see. In Bill Gates' case, once he saw the Internet wasn't a mirage, he did his best to own it, one of the more interesting late 20th century follies which saw he and the US Department of Justice cross swords. Most fortunate for him and Microsoft shareholders that his company was not broken up.

Maybe, just maybe, with serious updates coming to iLife and iWork, especially iWeb and perhaps a new Web 2.0-type application for enhanced collaboration, Steve will strike back and set things right. There is precedent for this when Apple under Steve's stewardship was slow to incorporate CD burners in the first bubble iMacs.

Seeing the error of his ways soon saw Steve introduce the "Rip.MIx.Burn" philosophy which so angered the RIAA at the time, and set Apple on the path to dominating the legal music download business.

Others in the Mac software domain can see the benefits of a beefed up .mac. The personal finance software I am experimenting with in order to do away with Quicken is iBank 2, from IGG software. It has links to .mac in order to help back up my data to my iDisk with one click - very Mac-like. (See screenshot below)

And there are other blogging software which also integrate with .mac, as does iSync from Apple itself. But the neglect of .mac in the face of so many other improvements for Mac owners is now becoming a burden.

This will be my last year with .mac I feel. It does some stuff for me, but it's now become a point of principle. I will not support a second-rate evocation of what should have been a brilliant, and much-copied web-based service, which is now appearing more and more redundant and without an intelligent roadmap for the future.

I won't participate in any hardware, software or service from Apple for which I have to apologise or feel like a second-rate citizen. Those days are behind Mac users now. Apple either rapidly improves .mac or it dumps it all together, like a 2006 e-World. Or just sell it off to someone who does have some foresight or passion for turning it into something truly special.