Future of .Mac?

Apple has been offering a set of online services, bundled under the name .Mac, for quite a while now. While I believe it was truly a great value a couple of years ago when web services was still a new thing, it now looks like it has ended up in a downward spiral. Very few new services have been offered recently, and any updates to it have just been minuscule improvements.

Some have suggested ways to revive the services, such as offering the some services separately. The idea of tying desktop applications with the internet is great, and for me personally the ability to synchronize the information on two or more Macs has been great.

However, this year I opted out on renewing my subscription with .Mac. I now exclusively use my email address under vikingstad.com and have moved all my old mail from Mail (the mail client in Mac OS X) to Gmail. Gmail is greatly superior to what .Mac webmail can offer, and even with the new .Mac webmail coming up I have a feeling it will still lag behind Gmail.

But .Mac is more than just webmail, so for my synchronizing needs I have started using a great FireFox extension called Google Browser Sync. This puts all my bookmarks, web password, history, cookies etc. on a Google server, and automatically synchronizes it with any other FireFox I am using. So being at work, I have access to the exact same information from within my browser there as at home.

The other important feature I used .Mac for was the image gallery feature, where you could easily export images from iPhoto to the web. However, that was before, now Apple is forcing you to use iWeb which is a more cumbersome solution. I have found using the two plugins for iPhoto great replacements: FlickExport (for automatic upload to my Flickr account) and iPhotoToGallery (that supports the very popular Gallery web application).

So in a sense it seems like Google was actually the main reason I stopped my .Mac subscription this year. In order for Apple to win me back they will have to offer a compelling set of online features again. However, without a killer webmail, great photo sharing capabilities and lots of online storage it will be hard to be truly convincing.

It will also be interesting to see if Apple will also shift focus to web services, as we have seen Microsoft scrambling to do recently. It might make more sense for Apple to just partner with a giant like Google, and now that Schmidt is on Apple's board that seems to be a very likely outcome.

As I have noted before, just about everything will sooner or later move over to the browser. We'll see of Apple is ready for the change, and if .Mac will receive more attention to be a part of Apple's future strategy...