cryptochrome's Journal: Making .Mac worthwhile

Apple has for some time had a $100/year internet service known as .Mac which I have never found cause to join. Most of the things it offers - home page, email, remote disk - can be had for free via a variety of other services. Now Apple has always been renowned for integrating hardware and software smoothly, so why not add .Mac to the service side of that equation? Unlike a home or work computer, a .Mac account is always on and available. It is the logical touchpoint for your presence on the web. Much more could be done with it.

For starters, a POTS-integrated VOIP service, also known as an internet telephone that talks to regular phones. But this one provides for direct and delayed voice, text, data, and optionally video from a variety of separate services to a common channel. A text message from a mobile shows up via iChat, and you click a button to reply right back with a phone call. An unlistened voice mail is retrieved over the web, and your text message reply becomes a text message on their phone or computer, or even parsed by a .Mac voice synthesizer and delivered to a normal phone (with disclaimer, of course). Plug an ordinary phone into your modem port and use it the normal way - or have your mac interpret your voice to automatically dial your call with Address Book or LDAP. Design an 802.11g handset that you can configure once and then use at any WiFi access point and you're making calls for free all over the place - make a deal with a cellular carrier and you can not only make and recieve calls anywhere for a fee (and make recieving IP calls more reliable), you have a portable wireless hub everywhere you go. Airport Mobile. Of course, you'd want to avoid telemarketing as much as you do spam - which is why .Mac could use caller ID (or other methods) to recognize friends and family and direct their communications directly to you, have others leave messages, and filter out known junk entirely (with help from a collaborative .Mac spam-and-marketer blacklist).

Another use for .Mac? Maybe TV listings? Or rather, a programming guide suitable for an Apple-branded PVR device or Macintosh program. Just make sure they're capable of handling video-on-demand seamlessly (from the internet or cable or radio or wherever) and home network integration (for playing files off other machines). Take it a step further, and integrate with conent-subscription services, automatically downloading fresh new shows and music. Let independent users make their own "must-see" lists to other's content. Let them extend other's content in powerful ways, such as referencing and splicing in clips, providing subtitles, audio comment tracks, and even overlaying video or sprites. Do it in reverse, allowing people and organizations to publish their video, audio, and data content via the web or subscription, using a model based on BitTorrent to take the bite out of popularity - with .Mac providing a reliable tracker and file-hash/small-file repository.

For that matter, how about blogging? Really, really well integrated blogging? Something with ad-hoc topic-based and community-built .Mac metasites and rss feeds. A way to create an extended family site as easily as a community on par with slashdot. Including an ultimate service tapping all blogs, with peer review, moderation, filtering, and random sampling allowing really interesting posts to bubble up from or sink into obscurity. What the internet has always promised but never quite delivered.

How about a secure way to give you a remote desktop for your home computer? And I mean REALLY secure - like with a USB jumpdrive that doubles as a decryption device/fingerprint reader/keycard. OK, maybe that one's a little risky. How about a little URL redirection service to point people to your public folder on your computer(s) when they're online, to bypass the unavoidable .Mac storage limits?

Through it all, .Mac could make everything work together, in whole or as parts. Your presence in and gateway to the network - your personal thoughts, your comments, your iPhoto albums, your iTunes stream, your iMovies, your email, your telephone, your dropbox, your anything, as an integrated whole or dispersed throughout the network. The possibilities are endless.