Tom Krazit wrote a pretty interesting article on CNET about Apple’s missed .MAC opportunity.
I am not going to recap what was in the article. However, I would like to point out that the picture is more complicated than what Tom painted.
For example, he talked about a low cost way to allow users to share photos à la Flickr. This is great. However, the simple ability to upload gigabytes of photo or other content is no longer sufficient in this Web 2.0 world. In the Web 1.0 days, you had a website and that was it.
Today, you have all sorts of accounts in multiple locations: Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube etc. This collection of accounts and all make up your online persona.
One thing I have admired about Flickr is how ubiquitous it has become. For example, I can publish my Flickr happenings on my Facebook profile. I can do the same with any social network that I create with Ning.com.
This means that if I am interested in photo sharing, all I need is to set up one single account with Flickr and I can share photos with the other “aspects” of my online persona.
I can do the same thing with YouTube: share my own videos or my favorite videos.
One of the problems many users encounter today is that they don’t want to or have the time to re-do or recreate their online profiles or content. One recent movement, for example, has been to allow users to share their online profiles across different social networking websites.
Therefore, if Apple really wants to leverage its .MAC property and provide a solid value to the consumer, it has to make it such that the consumer can link his content on his .MAC account to the other aspects of his online persona. Reducing the cost of subscribing to .MAC is not sufficient by itself.
I couldn’t agree more. It may not be burdensome for the kiddies to spend all day tending their various gardens, but it sure is for a working person.
I need to learn more about Flickr. I know everybody uses it, but how does it compare to, say, Picasa?
Flickr is a little more open than Picasa. For example, you can get free third-party Flickr uploaders which are very convenient for uploading multiple photos all at once.
Flickr also has better links to other web properties for sharing and such.