Filed under: iLife, Internet, Internet Tools, MobileMe
Apple announces end of .Mac HomePage
Apple has begun sending an email to MobileMe customers about a pending service change. Specifically, .Mac HomePage will be discontinued on July 7, 2009. While existing pages will remain live at their current addresses for MobileMe users, they'll no longer be able to edit them or add new ones. If you want to delete an existing page between now and then, simply visit the HomePage application. Groups will also be discontinued on July 7 when Apple shuts down all group email address, group HomePages, message boards and iDisk "Groups" folders. Your data will be safe, however, as Apple will move the "Groups" folder to a new folder on your iDisk called "Groups Archive."
While I never used Groups, it's kind of sad to see HomePage go. I can remember building homepages on my old 333mhz G3 iMac. It was so easy to make a quick-and-dirty site for sharing photos, etc. with grandma. No, it wasn't the cleanest code ever produced, but it was fun back in the day.
Of course, Apple recommends that customers consider MobileMe Galleries and iWeb as an alternative. You can get the full run-down here.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John said 6:52PM on 4-09-2009
So sad to see .mac disappearing from e-mail addresses and now webpages.
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sean said 6:57PM on 4-09-2009
All I have to say is good riddance. That offering was useless and outdated. Out with the bad and in with the good!
sean 808080
http://sean808080.com
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Madison said 10:00PM on 4-09-2009
I'm assuming webpages published from iweb and hosted on .mac/ MobileMe will be unaffected...?
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James said 9:47PM on 4-09-2009
iWeb is the most God-forsaken piece of garbage Apple has ever released, I'm sorry to say. And MobileMe appears to be a giant time-suck - I've yet to come across anyone who hasn't had problems at least once a month with sync issues, etc.
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perk said 10:14PM on 4-09-2009
I haven't.
John said 8:46AM on 4-10-2009
I've never had problems and that is since day 1.
bioadam said 1:04AM on 4-10-2009
First: iWeb is awesome and makes life worth living.
Second: MobileMe is a great syncing and data backup service from a solvent company.
Third: You didn't knock it, but MobileMe galleries are super slick and fun to use.
Dan said 12:02AM on 4-10-2009
You know, I've had a mac for a number of years now, and I really like Apple as a company. I'll also say that I understand that things move on and evolve. But Apple is developing a long and distinguished history of a "my way or the highway" attitude that flies in the face of the "customer is always right" mentality. When I got my first iBook way back in my youth, it was marketed as coming with iTools which would be free and would, among other things, usher in world peace and harmony. I never used it. That didn't mean I wasn't annoyed when my friend told me that Apple was unilaterally deciding that the whole free thing was madness if they could actually squeeze more money out of people who bought the computer understanding that iTools was part of the package. I never paid. Never using it and never paying for it doesn't change this core fact: changing the deal midstream is uncool. People invested in .mac. Apple decides that doesn't work for them and forces the change to mobileme (my investment in that choice being limited solely to acknowledging that .mac will always be a cooler email address than .me (which both costs Apple in market awareness for "macs" (a questionable advertising choice at best) and sounds hopelessly narcissitic... an image I wouldn't think Apple would wish to promote further)). Apple comes up with Firewire 400. People invest in it. It's still perfectly viable. Apple pulls it from most consumer products (including my unibody macbook). Did it hurt me personally? No. I don't have anything using FW400 and never did. Did others? Yes. Did it hurt them? Yes. Was SJ explanation that USB 2.0 is more dominant sufficiently outweigh that infliction? Reasonable minds can differ, but my personal opinion is no. Killing the powerPC chip is another one. iTunes comes out. .99 is the price of any tune. Period. Oh, except not any more.
I'm not dumping on Apple. As a general rule, I like Apple, but that doesn't mean you turn a blind eye to a glaring (and repeating) corporate policy. I'll probably always have a mac, but it's because their OS is superior. It certainly is not and will not be some promise Apple makes at the time of purchase. Apple's failed to follow through too many times recently for that to help them in the equation much.
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VanillaSpice said 1:32AM on 4-10-2009
On not one of the occasions you mention, did Apple break any "deal". There never was a deal that free iTools was "forever". Nor did Apple ever promise to always have FireWire 400, and they never promised to always stick with PowerPC chips.
You know why? Get this, you'll love it - it's a little thing called progress. Thank goodness Apple abandoned ADB and gave us USB. Thank goodness we now have better and faster chips than PowerPC ones. Thank goodness Apple continue to offer us newer, faster and better features, rather than still make computers with 5.25 inch floppy disk drives.
Alaric said 2:44PM on 4-10-2009
Good grief, Vanilla. Progress, huh? I could have sworn I said something about that. Oh... wait. I did. Right there in my second sentence when I talked about moving on and evolving. Go ahead and look; I'll wait.
See? Right there. I'm all for progress. I'm not for companies changing their minds on things without providing (as much as possible) a painless way to accommodate those who have bought into the current paradigm. A lot of the posts in response to this blog entry alone seem to agree (not even mentioning the uproar that FW400 caused). And don't tell me they couldn't have done it; they just didn't really bother because they think .mac isn't as good, and people should just realize it and move on, regardless of the inconvenience it causes. If that seems like good corporate policy to you, great. I respectfully disagree.
As for iTools, when you market something as free (and really as part of a whole package), most reasonable consumers aren't going to think: "hey, I'm getting a package of A, B, and C for price X but, surely, unless I can get the company to swear forever and ever amen that they'll never *again* charge me for A, B, or C, then one day the man's going to come knocking again."
Yeah, Apple can market computers, in part, by offering a free service and then, once people have bought the computer (and the marketing), unilaterally change direction and start charging. If you think that's good corporate policy, great. I respectfully disagree.
Rumblefish said 11:31PM on 4-09-2009
What does this mean for those of us who have created and maintain websites with Adobe Contribute? My site is based upon a connection to .Mac
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Jools said 7:15AM on 4-10-2009
It means nothing. Only the Homepage web application is going. Existing pages or pages uploaded via other Web Tools will still be accessible.
Jon Scordia said 2:37AM on 4-10-2009
You know what would make the removal of Homepage more acceptable? If Apple had been good enough to offer a way to transition your old Homepage based sites into a new shinier format and therefore retain their edibility by importing them into iWeb.
I agree Homepage is now outdated and limited and has had it's day, I actually like iWeb a lot, (the point here being that I love the fact I can now be present on the web but wish no knowledge of web languages so this simple user interface stuff may seem amateur, but so am I!). However I invested a lot of time and effort into my Homepage sites and I'm annoyed that I'll now have to start again from scratch.
The upgrade path is via the bin again!
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Dr. Spaceman said 1:33PM on 4-10-2009
Cool, now give me PHP and MySQL hosting for MobileMe so I can actually use it for something.
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lindaleea said 1:43PM on 4-13-2009
Dropping homepage is stupid. I have several sites up on .mac and I will not convert them to iweb. Iweb does not have the looks that I want for my CSS pages. I have had a .mac account now for 7-8 years and now I am seriously thinking about getting rid of it.
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Big Mac said 3:01AM on 6-24-2009
It's terrifically annoying for Apple to repeatedly eliminate services that some portion of its paying user base relied on. The most annoying aspect of Apple turning off these services is that it provides no upgrade path for those who paid to make use of them for years. At least they're adding some functionality for iPhones, but it's still annoying to see them taking things away. And yes, I realize that at least part of the reason why Apple is doing this to move away from WebObjects, but that doesn't mean orphaning users is the right thing to do. These types of experiences are cautionary tales for anyone who plans to make heavy reliance on cloud computing services in the future.
It's almost absurd that Apple isn't just killing Home Page, it won't let you do anything to the pages posted there past the cut-off date - not even delete them. That's why I deleted my perfectly good and simple download page for a simple widget I created back in the early days of OS X widgets. I don't want to get stuck indefinitely with something that I can't get rid of even though I have no reason to get rid of the page as of now. Poor move. I expect better from Apple.
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