Before MobileMe there was .Mac, and before there was iWeb, there was .Mac HomePage. Well, good thing the latter has been replaced ’cause Apple is officially declaring them EOL (end of life) come July 7. After that date, whatever is there will remain there forever (or until Apple gets tired of it and yanks them down). So get with converting to iWeb or rolling yourself something custom.

Full text of the mailing after the break…

Dear MobileMe member:

On July 7, 2009, the .Mac HomePage web application will be discontinued. As of this date, you will no longer be able to create new pages or edit existing pages using HomePage. Any pages you’ve already published will remain live at their current web address for as long as you like. If you need to make changes to your existing pages, please do so before July 7.

Instead of HomePage, we recommend the other sharing features of your MobileMe membership. With MobileMe Gallery, you can share photos online directly from iPhoto or the web application at www.me.com. And using iWeb on your Mac, you can create custom websites and blogs and publish them to MobileMe.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause. For more information, please read this FAQ. And thank you for being a MobileMe member.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team

Apple’s brand new MobileMe News (formerly MobileMe Updates) is back with their second post this week (and luckily for links, finally sporting unique URLs to boot!). The subject of their latest post? How previous .Mac users can keep using their @mac.com addresses on the iPhone post-MobileMe transition:

If you want to use your mac.com address instead of me.com for the MobileMe address on your iPhone or iPod touch, you can simply remove the me.com account (if you’ve already created one) and then add a new MobileMe account entering username@mac.com for the email address. Any contacts, calendars, and bookmarks you are syncing will re-appear on your phone. It can take several seconds to minutes to update your phone depending on how much data you have and your network connection speed. If possible, it is best to do this when you are on a wi-fi connection for the fastest response.

Easy enough? Well, there is one small little restriction: the above only works if you originally had an @mac.com address prior to July 9, 2008. After the MobileMe transition, no new @mac.com addresses were generated, leaving those new to the… er… new service with @me.com as the only option.

Personally, I’m not sure what to do with my account yet. Me.com seems a little too precious for everyday use, while @mac.com hits too many fanboy cords for comfort. Can we get custom domains for email as well as websites? What’s your preference?

This is it. We’re in the home stretch. Games in overtime, the shot clock is almost done, and Steve Jobs is soaring from mid-court looking for the slam dunk. In 3 days we find out if Apple brings down the net, the two-peat for smartphone (even gadget) championship, or if they bounce it off the rim (pun sorta intended) with their mostly evolutionary, not so much revolutionary, next generation handset.

Saturday we mentioned one big change: the fast 3G data chip. Sunday it was GPS. Monday we tackled the 2.0 Firmware update. Today we’re looking at the rebirth of .Mac: MobileMe.

Note: .Mac users have been able to send to username@me.com for a few days already, and as of yesterday, July 7, could both send and receive using me.com. (Just tried it out and it works!)

Now word comes that, to accommodate New Zealand, which due to their time zone gets the iPhone 3G way before anyone else, Apple has announced that it’s really not 3 days to MobileMe — just one! That’s right, MobileMe goes live on Wednesday, July 9 between 6pm and 12am PST. Mark your calendars, then get ready to “push” sync them!

Why should you want to? Read on after the break!

iTools made its debut at Macworld 2000, way before the iPhone, and before OS X as well. Originally free, it became the subscription based .Mac in 2002. The first version of .Mac included IMAP email, web hosting, iDisk, Backup, and… er… iCards. Small tweaks were made over the years, including increases to iDisk storage (currently starting at 10GB), syncing Mac applications like Mail, Address Book, iCal, Safari bookmarks, Keychain passwords, Dock, Dashboard Widgets, etc. between multiple Macs, an AJAX web 2.0 interface for .Mac Mail, Galleries with iPhoto/Aperture photo and iMovie video integration, and Back to My Mac for easy remote file and screen sharing between laptops and desktops, work, home, and travel.

While the $99 price tag (discounted if you bought it with a new Mac, or from online retailers like Amazon) was stiff for some, there were arguable benefits for people with multiple Mac, but not much for iPhone users aside from an email account they could get for free form Yahoo!, Google, and many others. Indeed, the industry in general felt .Mac had fallen badly behind the times. Even Steve Jobs conceded the service had been neglected, and promised to do better.

And do better they have! (Well, except for the name…) At WWDC 2008, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller announced the all new, all better, .Mac replacement: MobileMe, and dubbed it “Exchange for the Rest of Us.”

Exchange, of course, is Microsoft’s business solution, which the iPhone also supports via ActiveSync. Exchange, through proprietary technology’s requiring an Exchange Sever, “pushes” updates to email, contact lists, and calendar events to desktop clients like Outlook on Windows and Entourage on the Mac, and to scads of mobile devices, including Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm Treo, etc.

Unlike traditional services, which “pull” data at user-definable intervals (i.e., manual, every 5 min. every 10 min., every hour, etc.) and are only updated during those server checks, “push” immediately sends anything arriving on the server. So, if you “pull” email at 12:00, an email arrives at 12:03, and you only “pull” that email again at 12:10, you only receive that email at 12:10 (7 minutes after it arrives). With “push”, you wouldn’t check the server at all, the email would arrive at 12:03 and instantly alert you it was there. (Whether you need precise, per second email, and whether you want to be alerted constantly, on demand, without pause or respite, is up to you).

MobileMe provides this very same service to any subscriber. Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. Someone sends you an email, it pops right up on your iPhone. Change a contact on your iPhone, the MobileMe website will instantly update it as well. Delete an appointment on your PC, it will immediately be removed from your iPhone. All your data, synced instantly, all the time.

Add to that some SproutCore powered eye candy in the form of lush, desktop-class but web-based online applications (similar to how Google Gmail, gCal, etc. work), integrated with the same Gallery photo and video features of .Mac, and topped off with a web-accessible iDisk, all available not only to Windows users but Mac users as well (even Linux/Unix/etc. users via Web standard browsers), with the same special multiple-Mac sync and Back to My Mac bonuses for Apple faithful, and you have one tremendously powerful offering fully on par with the best of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. (Albeit at the same $99 price!)

Still curious about how it looks and how it drives? Check out Apple’s online Guided Tour.

I’m a .Mac user, so I’ll be getting MobileMe for sure. What about you?

.Mac has been up and down again over the last few days, which is nothing new, but this time it seems like the transition to MobileMe might actually have begun. Some people are reportedly able to receive mail at the me.com version of their alias (meaning name@mac.com is already mapping to name@me.com for some).

I just tried it, and received an “illegal alias” error for my trouble. Is it working yet for you?

Read

Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That’s when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.

Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).

Server problems round Infinite Loop way? Transitions to MobileMe hitting some speed bumps? Karmic revenge for us knocking the RIM NOC again?

My guess is the road to MobileMe will be a wild ride, server side…

During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.

Apple’s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like “push” email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.

iDisk (the online storage service) gets a bump to 20GB, and goes fully online as well. Mac user? Still enjoy the Mac sync, iWeb, and Back-to-my-Mac that you know (and I) love.

Launching in July in time for the new iPhone 3G, and priced at the same $99 as .Mac, it still smacks the expensive, but if your don’t have Exchange, and value highly polished syncing and web-based solutions, this might just be the service for you.

Existing .Mac customers will be rolled into MobileMe — see Apple’s migration page for details — with a choice of maintaining their old @mac.com address, or the new @.me equivalent.

For more, go to me.com (which will redirect you to Apple.com/MobileMe), where a handy-dandy MobileMe guided tour awaits!

We’ve gone over just how bad the Mobile Me brand sounds to us a couple of times already (almost as bad as this week’s service!), but now reports surface that there may just be something better hidden beneath the bad label:

MobileMe is slated to include a host of new features, which we alluded to early in May; in addition, there will be new web interfaces for all aspects of MobileMe — calendars will look just like iCal, Contacts will look just like they do in Address Book, etc. This is similar to the way .Mac Webmail works today, though we’ve heard that the new interfaces will be much snazzier (yes, that’s a technical term).

Delivery estimate? Late June/July timeframe, hooking into the iPhone 2.0 and not only the newly released OS X 10.5.3, but potentially Windows as well.

Read

Yesterday came word that the name Apple might be using to rebrand .Mac was “Mobile Me”, and amid the pitchforks, torches, and angry villagers storming the internet pipes to Cupertino, we figured our readers could easily come up with a better name, and sweetened the pot with $50 worth of gift card incentive to prove it.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber had previously mentioned that iMobile might be an alternative, though his readers felt it could too easily be mistaken for immobile, probably not the poetry Steve Jobs is shooting for.

Now Gruber, and his handy crowd-source at Twitter bring word that just plain old “Me”, surfaced as me.com, could be a candidate as well, and had mysteriously changed ownership just today.

Make of that what you will (and I will continue to make fun, for the same reasons mentioned in the first post). And don’t forget to enter our contest. Pick a better name than “Mobile Me”, and if the blog staff likes your name best, the $50 gift certificate is yours! [We'll compile the guesses from this and from our previous post. The Gift Card is for the Phone different Accessory store. Deadline: 4EST on Monday June 2nd].

[From Dieter: I dislike this whole "me" thing for several reasons. First, it smacks of a 1990's, by-committee branding that sounds hip and clever but is actually staid and out-of-touch. Very Un-Apple. Second: If Apple somehow manages to make this brand hip and the "Me" does make people feel like they have ownership and identity with the brand ("Me.com really is about ME. Gosh, it's like it's my very own internet service,") then they'll be faced with an impossible task: not screwing that up. Think about how unhappy you are with .Mac's reliability and speed. Now imagine if that service weren't called ".Mac" but instead "Me." People will become disenamoured very quickly. Now we can obviously assume that this whole Me.com thing will have better reliability -- but if Apple really is looking for a straight-out, bald-faced "this is Me on the internet" branding, then even the tiniest failure in the system is going to make people super pissed -- it would go from "Aw crap, .Mac sucks again" to "Me.com is down again. Apple broke ME". Not good.

Thirdly: Windows ME. 'nuff said.]

Roughly Drafted recently proposed that neither impending 3G nor poor supply chain management were to blame for Apple Store’s lack of iPhone stock, but rather the international gray market for unlocked handsets.

Now, based on a post from Infrageeks, they’re back with a look at how Apple could replace some carrier kick-back revenue with .Mac subscription revenue, if El Jobso saw fit to beef up the service and better tie it into the iPhone.

Our own Chad Garrett has already made the case for .Mac syncing via the iPhone, and iPhone Alley, (via TUAW) has said it’s coming, so what’s Dilger’s take?

Integrating .Mac services into its iPhone and iPod Touch mobile platform would not only make the devices more valuable and competitive, but would also add a layer of ongoing subscription revenue that would enable the company to more profitably sell unlocked iPhones at regular prices in emerging markets where demand is off the charts. Rather than paying a smuggler $800, Apple could sell customers the iPhone at the regular $399 price, bundled with a two year .Mac subscription for another $99 a year. This would rapidly develop Apple’s software service revenue and allow the company a significant budget for investing to keep the services up to date and valuable for users.

What value would $99 bring? The details are in the full article, but include network data sync, file sharing, back-to-my-mac, blogging, hyperblogging, a reputation system, community profiles, secure identity services, marketplace, privacy management, data sharing/networking, and subscription music.

Would those services be worth $99 a year to you? Would they be worth giving up the carrier revenue for Apple? What do you think?

Do you use Apple’s .Mac Services? I do. I like the synchronization between my Macs; it really makes life easy. With the iPhone, I really get a lot of benefit. I can add a website, Calendar appointments, Address Book entry, etc on my iPhone and it gets synced across multiple machines.

So why can’t I access my iDisk on my iPhone? I realize actually creating documents might be a stretch, but at least an adherence to Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines for iDisk on the iPhone via Safari should not be too hard. But why stop there. Why not an optimized view of my web-based .Mac Mail? Or Address Book?

I think it would be an awesome value for .Mac subscribers to get an optimized array of Apple’s services to the iPhone. They could start with their own Web App Gallery. What do you think? Would a tighter integration of Apple’s services with the iPhone make it that much more desirable?