I think .Mac means different things to different people. It is good that Apple is making iterative improvements to the service. This latest iteration shows a renewed interest in providing better service and I think it will make most users happy.
The best way I thought they could improve .Mac was to look to other systems features and offer a better interface and integration with OS X. I wanted photos to look and work like flickr.com, but better (I really wish you could blog images in .Mac). I wanted movies to work like youTube.com, but better (the quality of youTube movies are not great). I wanted email to be organized like gmail.com, but better (though .Mac offers IMAP and gmail is still POP3).
‘Groups’ is a great new feature. It is a very useful and powerful service. Just look at backpackit.com. I cannot wait to see all the uses of this. I really like the tight integration.
The 1 GB of space was necessary. Today, 250 MB is just paltry. This is going to enable people to host more of those HD movies Apple has been talking about a lot lately.
One other way Apple can improve on .Mac is to break free of the yearly updates. I understand that they push out new releases every 12 months. I just think it would help to keep users and keep them happy if they can push out new features or improvements every 6 months.
For me, I will continue to use my godaddy.com hosted site, leegillen.com. I’m a developer and I like the ability to make a dynamic page, though, in all honesty, I don’t have much use for it at the moment.
But in addition to linking to my content on flickr.com, youtube.com, and blogger.com, I am thinking of subscribing to .Mac and linking to my .Mac content. I might even drop my youtube.com for .Mac. I always liked the .Mac interface better.
.Mac will be useful to me for:
1. Backups
2. Movies
3. Email
4. Groups (like racquetball club, mountain bike club, New England fall foliage photo club, Wine clubs, etc)
5. Static web pages
6. Large file storage
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