.Mac Renewed

Some time ago I wrote that I was considering not renewing my .Mac account. I have just renewed it, so what changed my mind?

To be honest no one thing, more a number of reasons:

- in reviewing the book’.Mac with iWeb‘ I sort of re-realized the potential of .Mac and thought that I should explore a bit more with how I use iWeb etc.,

- one of my real issues was with the unreliability of the service when posting to my iWeb site, both in terms of publishing times and server down times. This has significantly improved recently. This may be because I have recently reduced the number of pictures and videos that I have on our site, but it is still reasonably media rich so I am not sure if that is the case,

- I am a fan of iWeb. I accept all the limitations that people say it has and I agree, but as a fun personal web site that allows a little bit of everything (blog, ‘cast, media) it is really easy to use and although I could have hosted it on my own hosting account I would have a lost a number of the features that I like i.e. enhanced slideshows, the hit counter, password protection, blog search field and option to leave comments,

- I love Photocasting with iPhoto. Although I don’t have that many people that I do this with at the moment I want to give it another year before I decide if this is a waste of time or not. Again I looked at the options for doing it through my FTP server, and whilst there is a similar concept available it isn’t the same. Again the ease of use and integration with iLife was a very persuasive argument,

- although I don’t use the backup function at all because 1GB is laughably small, I am hoping the rumours are true about increased capacity,

- I want to see what iLife 07 has in store for us. My view is that Apple are going to make .Mac even more integral to our lives. This makes sense as we are all depending ore on more on hosting space, so why would they invest so much in the tools that require a hosting service and not get a bigger slice of the cake?

Add to that I got $20 off by purchasing on Amazon, and a feeling (or is that hope) that they will up the storage capacity soon meant that I will give it one more year.

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