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Dear Steve Jobs,

The private walled garden known as .Mac is out of touch with reality. With .Mac's major features available for free from various web 2.0 companies .Mac is becoming irrelevant. iLife's many sharing features are crippled if you don't have .Mac.

If .Mac hadn't become pay only in the .bomb days, it would have grown to be the largest social network today. For example just adding a friends networking feature based on iChat buddy lists or AddressBook could make .Mac a wonderful MySpace replacement. .Mac as a social network can sell more Macs, iPods, Photo prints, music and movies. .Mac could make the life of Mac users easier and better.

To still have the .Mac tax today is just plain stupid. Why make users pay? Bandwidth costs? Nope. Apple is selling movies and TV shows for less than 10 bucks? It would take weeks for an average user to use that much bandwidth. Storage? Nah. That's too cheap to even discuss.

Someone at Apple needs to re-do those basic calculations of what the residual value of a .Mac user is to Apple.

Steve, with the iPod success heading for the plateau, you need a new killer app, .Mac can make Apple the hottest and most useful social network.  Do something before dotMac becomes deadMac. Or kill .Mac & have the dev teams work on making iLife integrate better with other successful 2.0 sites.

Frankly no one cares for .Mac anymore.

Cheers.

Technorati Tags: iLife, MySpace, apple, .Mac

Email has been a reliable form of communication for many years but, in the last 10 years, thanks spam and phishing email is dying.

Email worked because it was a quick and sure way to communicate with individuals over the net. Spam and phishing concerns attack the two key things in any communication medium:

1. Know who you are talking to. Thanks to spam, you can't tell if the email you receive is from a real human that knows you or has real reasons to contact you.

   With phishing you have emails that look genuine to trick you into performing some act.

2. Know that you are being heard/read. If you send out an email, there is no longer any real guarantees that the recipient has received it.

If you can't receive real genuine emails, can't be certain if the recipient will get your message, and are afraid to share your email address with others, why bother with email at all?

This rant was caused by years of watching the email platform crumble and this article at Techdirt -
When You Can't Tell The Phishing Emails From The Legit Ones, Just Ignore Them All

I think it is time to look for new options...any ideas?