If, however, you are a fan of the “Farmville in medieval times” and the “Farmville in… well, Farmville times” game titles that are all the rage with the kids (and Jimmy Fallon), I have compiled some data that may help you make some educated decisions in-game. Namely, I’ve attempted to compile the earning ratios of both crops and buildings (the two revenue- and experience-generating facets of the games) so as to minimize the time I needed to spend to jump levels. And now I’ve opened that data up in hopes that its of help to someone else playing the game.

Please note, however, that none are complete, largely due to the fact that I’m a casual player of these games. (As of writing this, I am level 27 in We Rule and level 11 in We Farm, both of which have levels going well into the 30s, I believe..) As such, I can see that there are levels I haven’t achieved, but I can’t fill in the details until I get there. (Are you already there at the finish line? Then please skip to the end of this post to see how you can help.)

For any developers out there interested in leveraging this data in their apps, too, you can grab (and query and filter) the entire data set using YQL (Yahoo! Query Language). (After recently reading Christian Heilmann‘s fantastic “How to Create a Web Service in a Matter of Minutes,” particularly the “Turning an Editable Data Set into a Web Service” section, I knew I had a great project worth testing against his example.)

Just run these queries thru YQL, and you’re off and running.

• select * from ngmoco.we.rule.crops
• select * from ngmoco.we.rule.structures
• select * from ngmoco.we.farm.structures
• select * from ngmoco.we.farm.crops

Frustrated that this isn’t comprehensive? Care to enhance the data? It’s all available in a large Google Docs spreadsheet. Chip in, and help refine the data set. (Even better? It’s already got 2 sheets waiting for We City to drop.)

Lastly, if you’re looking for someone else to add to your collectives in these games, I’m “mlaaker” in both games.

But now, with Google TV having just been announced at Google I/O (where its Android platform powers the Apps, the set-top device and remote), there is a new rumor going ’round: the Apple TV will be reborn as a smaller, cheaper box running the iPhone OS, iPhone A4 processor, and cloud-hosted media. Makes sense to me, even two years ago.

With Google, Boxee, Roku, TiVo and many others ratcheting up the iTV fight, Apple will likely re-engage in this space. Their (sad for me) acquisition of Lala would seemingly be focused on how to incorporate the technology/people behind it’s cloud-based storage of media.

Apple already owns the mobile screen in the US (with iPod, iPad, and iPhone) and is doing well on the desktop/laptop screen ownership. Why not the last (and first) screen in nearly every household? Such a move would not only help its current reign, but also extend its gaming footprint into the world of Sony and Nintendo. It would appear to just be a matter of time now…

The App’s visual representation of the buildings are handled by beautifully-rendered illustrations (by Kalani Kordus) rather than over top of a Google map. This affords an ability to see each level of each building and highlight only elements of importance (conference rooms, not janitors’ closets).

The App, however, is missing some very important information. It doesn’t know -where- these important elements are. And because it doesn’t know that, it can’t know where I am in relationship to the rooms.

To know where such things exist, a location data store (describing lat/long locations of every object’s borders) must exist. The problem is, how do you get the very data that has, to date, been hard to come by? How can Apps get access to location data which isn’t in Google Maps already but is relevant to a group of people? In other words, how do we move from just understanding objective data (such as “Golden Gate Park” or “701 1st AVE, Sunnyvale, CA 94089″) to something more subjective (such as “de Young museum lawn” or “Yahoo! 1st floor bathroom”)?

I think the answer is somewhat simple: build a mobile App and a website to leverage those same people who’d be interested in the data in the first place. As they have a vested interest in the service, these users could accomplish tasks fed to this App by the developer looking to harvest and use the data.

To do this, the App would need to do several things:

1. Sign In/Register. Not because users love making new accounts, but rather because the system will need to support private projects and online storage.

2. Location capture. Lat/long coordinates WITH WiFi base station MAC address. Also any info from gyroscope and compass, if possible. (Could be useful if you’re wanting to plot where the door to a room is, or indicate direction.)

3. Metadata capture. User-added tags, notes, photos, videos, audio, etc. (Optional, but could feed the developer useful materials.)

4. Project selection. Choose a community project (whether public or private) based on current location and/or user account; or, choose a personal project.

5. Settings. Assuming most users will be submitting several locations towards the same goal, the App must facilitate rapid entry where it’s default is to use the last-used project, tags, etc. (Maybe the App should set a distance threshold, so that if a user captures a location 6 miles away from the previous location, the App assumes a new project?)

6. Submission queue. Connectivity could fail at any point; hold onto any captures that haven’t yet been submitted.

Additionally, this App will need a Web front-end (where developers can post projects, determine whether anyone or just a select few can participate, review results, modify entries, get access to the data via data dumps (i.e. CSV, XML, etc.) or data feeds (i.e. An API), and highlight their most prolific/helpful contributors. Assumedly users should be able to access the site, too, to modify their submissions, see the results of their participation, and sign up for projects not yet tackled.

The value of such an App would seem to be immense to anyone building location-aware Apps whose locations aren’t covered (or applicable) on Google Maps and other traditional mapping/location services. Developers could offer successful contributors money ala Mechanical Turk, a free copy of their App, or just recognition of who helped out.

There’s already been numerous successful user-submitted tagging enterprises to-date. Why not one for location, where the user doesn’t even need to learn lat/long coordinates, machine tags, or anything technical? Instead, all they need is the desire to help, an iPhone/Android phone, and the ability to press a button when at a location a developer requests.

Sounds possible. The question is: who wants to help build it?

• Read the profile of your user (photo, nickname, real name, age, sex, location, work and education history, and interests),
• Read your user’s list of friends/connections,
• Read/Write your user’s status message,
• Read your user’s list of Updates (i.e. their activities from Yahoo! and the rest of the Web),
• Write your user’s activities from inside your app into her Updates stream,
• Query, filter, and join any data from Yahoo! and other Web services via YQL, and
• Broker your user’s permission to access this information using OAuth.

What does all this mean? It’s simple. An app using this SDK can pull in my Yahoo! profile information, plot me and my friends on a map (grabbing the locations stored in our profiles), compare our listening preferences (grabbing our favorite music preferences), and broadcast my activity (i.e. “Micah just posted a new high score of 18,478 in Bejeweled 2“) which, in turn, drives my friends (and more) to your app.

You can learn more at YDN (as well as find all the documentation).

And, if you build anything interesting using the code, please let me know… we’re always interested in showcasing great developer-built solutions (using Yahoo! technology) on the YDN blog. Even better, come out and join in at the iPhone Dev Camp Yahoo! is hosting July 31 – August 2, 2009.

However, and this may sound strange, I’m not always interested in what I’m interested in. After getting my fill of news on all things data visualization, design, Mac, tiny houses, cryptozoology, App platforms, social media, deals, foreign policy, StarCraft, and Paul Simon, I sometimes wonder what other folks are reading.

And that’s when I turn to Newspyle.

Newspyle is a simple, 3-columned website that shows the latest news bubbled up by others (who I generally don’t know) on Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. I’m able to see, at a glance, what the rest of the world is finding interesting. Obviously, these three sites aren’t truly representative of the antithesis of all things Micah. (There’s still plenty of Mac, design, and web-oriented news.) But there is a fair bit of content I otherwise wouldn’t see… and wouldn’t bother perusing each of these sites (or their associated feeds) to filter such gems.

Only problem is, when viewed on the iPhone, the Newspyle site was hard to work with. It’s 3-column approach, which worked well on laptops and desktops, became hard to navigate and read on a smaller screen. The often-limited bandwidth of the phone, too, posed a hurdle when all the Digg links sent users off to Digg first (instead of directly to the story you were interested in).

Because of this, I recently built my first iPhone Web App: Newspyle for iPhone. And all it took was 2 hours. Actually, it took 20 minutes to make the App. But then I needed an extra hour and 40 minutes to troubleshoot some nuances that weren’t quite right initially. I did all of this using 4 things:

1. Newspyle (for the idea),
2. Dapper (to extract content from Digg, Reddit, and Delicious),
3. SimplePie (to parse the 3 sites’ RSS feeds and print the content into the App),
4. WebApp.net (which, somewhat ironically, isn’t available at http://webapp.net/ but provides the iPhone UI appearance).

The whole process was remarkably easy, as the time allotment suggests. Of course, it helped that the idea was already baked. And that tools like Dapper, SimplePie, and WebApp.net exist. And, are free.

Even more exciting, though, than simply building the App was that it made it (in some way, shape, or form) into the actual product. On a whim, I emailed Kunal Anand (the good fellow behind Newspyle) to tell him about what I put together (and attached the “working” code). Instead of a cease-and-desist or a thanks-but-no-thanks, Kunal seemed genuinely appreciative of the work, and pushed a similar but superior version live to the public. (I don’t know the details of Kunal’s reworking of the code, but it runs much faster, has better state memory, and uses a battle-tested backend solution.)

As such, now any visitor to the Newspyle site using an iPhone is automatically redirected to Newspyle for iPhone. And now, hopefully, more folks will get to enjoy (in an easier-to-read and lighter memory footprint) the collective wisdom of the crowds (at Digg, Reddit, and Delicious) while on-the-go.

All in all, this was a great introduction to iPhone development, and my (little) effort made things easier for me. I now get a much quicker browsing experience at Newspyle while on my iPhone, and hopefully others will, too. I again extend my thanks to Kunal for so graciously accepting the work of a fan; the Web is a wonderful place when folks can interact, contribute, and extend in this manner.

(PS: If you want a great way to use Google Reader on the iPhone, aside from their iPhone-optimized site, be sure to check out Byline by Phantom Fish.)

Or so my theory goes.

Why is that? Apple dropped the Apple TV on consumers in January 2007 as a “hobby.” Since then, it has released several software updates, including a major on-demand kiosk service this past January.

Also during that time, Apple has released two versions of the iPhone, one of its biggest mainstream successes to date. Unlike the Apple TV, though, Apple provided iPhone users with an App Store: a means of extending the device with 3rd-party-developed Apps.

These Apps are developed somewhat differently than those for the Mac desktop. Namely, rather than the keyboard and mouse standards of yore, they are tuned to leverage the device’s alternate input mechanisms (multi-touch display, limited visible real estate, accelerometer, gyroscope, location-aware GPS/WiFi, Bluetooth, camera, and cellular connection) and alternate environments (indoors/outdoors, small physical screen, one-handed interaction, noisy surroundings, varied lighting, etc.).

Because of this shift in development, Apps developed for the iPhone (in my argument) are more in line with Apps that would be useful for the Apple TV (and not desktop Apps). The Apple TV currently ships with an Apple remote control that took some cues from the iPod: it has a 4-direction clickwheel and two buttons (Play and Menu). This limited set of possible interactions generally works well for the TV, but would work terribly for desktop Apps (where users are used to multiple inputs: 104-plus keys on a keyboard and a dual-click, scroll-wheel mouse). Anyone, in fact, who’s had to enter their 32-character WiFi password on the Apple TV unit using the directional clicker and Play button knows such interaction is painful; what is easy on the computer desktop is very difficult six feet away from the screen with limited input controls.

Apple clearly knows this.

To date, Apple’s software updates have added very few Apps to the Apple TV. Those they do provide are primarily restricted to “browsing” functions (i.e. tasks that involve simple directional scrolling and a couple clicks). Aside from browsing/playing video content, you can browse/play music, photos, and podcasts. In the few cases where the user needs to do more than browse or play, “keyboard entry” is limited to activities such as entering search terms for podcasts or supplying a username and password. Why? Because moving across a virtual, on-screen keyboard one click at a time with the Apple remote is time-consuming, painful, and so not “Apple-like.”

However, Apple has begun to tie the iPhone and Apple TV together already to simplify such a complex interaction. By releasing the “Remote” Application on the iTunes App Store at launch, Apple now provides Apple TV users an alternate means of accessing a virtual keyboard: rather than click with the Apple Remote, users can instead access the iPhone’s virtual keyboard (far from perfect, but light years better than the Apple TV’s beast). Aside from just keyboard entry, the “Remote” App also provides alternate menu access to controlling the selection and playback of video and audio content on the TV.

With one tiny App, Apple unveiled a powerful connection between the two non-Mac devices. Suddenly, users have two devices that stand tall on their own, but, by joining together, add up to be greater than their sum. The result? Giant, hi-def HDTVs as the display; Web-connected computer capable of handling concurrent App tasks and video signal decoding; a remote that has a multi-touch display, accelerometer, gyroscope, camera, and cellular connection; and (maybe most importantly) a compact format that fits well in a home living room entertainment center.

Because of this possibility, I would predict Apple begins to do 2 things:

1. allow developers to create rich, Internet-connected, iPhone-controllable Apps for the Apple TV using an extension of the iPhone SDK, and
2. distribute Apps to the Apple TV using the iPhone App Store (potentially with a filter for TV-only Apps).

So, aside from creating a cool home entertainment hydra, why would Apple enable the iPhone SDK for development of Apple TV Applications? I would posit several reasons:

• Name:
  I’ll lead with my weakest argument: the iTunes App Store is called the iTunes App Store, not the iPhone App Store. This would seem to suggest Apple is keeping the door open to distribute Apps to platforms beyond the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• Greed:
  $30 million was earned in the first month of the App Store’s release, with $70 million more the following month. Six million total Apple TV units are predicted to be in homes by end of 2008 compared to the 12 million iPhones in the market now. This would suggest a theoretical $25 million/month for the yet-to-be-supported Apple TV unit. Do I think that’s unrealistic? Sure. But even 1/10th of that figure would suggest an attractive revenue stream.
• Development Environment:
  Both Mac and iPhone development use Apple’s Xcode. And while the iPhone uses it’s own OS, the Apple TV uses a customized OS X. Apple TV App development could leverage UI controls and the simplified focus of the iPhone while having access to OS X’s amazing developer palette.
• Patent Mining:
  Apple filed a patent two years ago suggesting some big changes to the product: the Apple TV as a lightweight widget/application platform. The thinking therein appears to suggest that app-like widgets could enhance a user’s viewing experience (whether by facilitating live chat with other viewers, providing contextual information against the current feature ala VH1′s Popup Video, etc.), and describes a number of possible widgets: Weather, Stocks, World Clock, Sports, and Video Chat.

Because of these points, I believe there’s a strong chance Apple will further connect the iPhone and Apple TV. Or, Apple could replace the Apple TV entirely, and come out with a killer Mac Mini/Apple TV-hybrid unit. One generally never knows what Steve Jobs has up his sleeve until his Tuesday announcements…

(Side note: this isn’t a new idea… several more-informed folks have suggested similar ideas in the past. AppleInsider proposed the Apple TV as a “casual gaming” device, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog has been clamoring for Apple TV Apps for some time. Update: The Inquisitr just proposed a similar call for an Apple TV App Store.)

I instantly downloaded it, and added several of my WordPress blogs to the app. Aside from the annoying Twitter Tools glitch (which sent an empty tweet on blog setup), I was surprised to see some big omissions that would impede regular usage for site administrators… at least from my standpoint.

• Dashboard functions
  As readers here know, I don’t post every day. I do, however, very regularly check my WordPress Dashboard. The Dashboard wraps up basic stats, such as the five most recent comments, incoming links, number of new unapproved comments, and WordPress news for the package itself (and 3rd-party plugins).

  I find this data invaluable to know if there’s anything I need to take action on (such as marking a new comment as ‘approved’ or ‘spam’) or learning about a security exploit.

• Global Drafts
  The second-most popular task for me in WordPress is creating and editing a draft post on the server. It generally takes me several revisions before I post a “post” here. (This one, for instance, has taken 10+ edits over 1.5 weeks.)

  Unfortunately, though, the iPhone WordPress app only can edit and save local drafts (i.e. those on the iPhone itself). This is probably the biggest deal-breaker for me. I don’t want to write and edit on my iPhone, as the keyboard is so awkward. I would, however, as it makes it convenient to drop in a quick edit or two, or get started on a new idea. But, preferably, I’d take a full, non-finger-crippling, physical keyboard experience over the on-screen, cramped digital keyboard. Because of this, I wouldn’t now dream of starting a post on the iPhone knowing I couldn’t switch back to the desktop keyboard later.

  Maybe one day Apple will allow Bluetooth keyboards to pair with the iPhone. (Maybe even starting with their own keyboards, in fact!) Until then, this app will just serve as a monitoring and quick editing environment.

  (Side note: It appears this issue may be larger than that of this app. I’ve noticed similar drawbacks plague ecto and MarsEdit, too. Anyone know why this is, and/or a workaround?)

• Links (add, remove, order)
  The iPhone has a number of built-in controls and UI elements for creating and managing lists. WordPress, too, has great built-in support for Links which populate a blog’s Blogroll section. Why not blend the best of both worlds? List management for your blog using the iPhone’s easy list management UI features? It sounds delightful.
• Widget addition, order, removal
  Similar to Link management, the ability to re-order, customize, and enable/disable Widgets for WordPress. Honestly, re-ordering widgets using the WordPress Web-based manager is rather awkward… having used the iPhone’s list control UI before, I imagine I’d prefer handling all Widget activity on the iPhone altogether.
• Plugin control and updates
  Plugins are well-known to cause performance issues for some WP blogs, and occasionally they can cause sites to come to a screeching halt. Being able to toggle a plugin on and off remotely would allow site administrators to quickly re-enable a site simply by flipping a plugin off (and/or back on). Further, WordPress now allows most plugins to be updated (when updates are offered) via the Web interface. As such, being able to click a couple links to bring all your plugins up-to-date would be very useful.
• Run backups
  The thing about backups is: you never think to backup your files till its too late… why not just offer the “Save to server” and “Email backup” options (sans “Download to your computer” due to limited iPhone storage opportunities)?
• Stats
  Last but not least, the WordPress Stats plugin has become invaluable to me. I’m a big fan of Google Analytics (who significantly raised the bar on visualizing web usage data several years ago), but there are few times that I head over to the Google site to check out how my blog is doing. The WordPress Stats plugin gives me my most basic visualizations (such as visitors over time, top posts, top searches, and most active) right on the Dashboard. It’s not a 3rd-party plugin, as its made by Automattic (the folks behind WP itself and Akismet), so no (legal) reason not to include in this package.

  I know the plugin currently uses Flash to render its chart, but I’d happily deal with a static, cached PNG or GIF if that got me some level of site monitoring via the app.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I understand I’m looking at a 1.0 release, not a 2.x or 3.x version. Many of the features I’m describing are fine to release after supporting basic posting functionality. Further, the app is free… which means the good folks at Automattic dropped at least a benjamin simply to offer freeloaders (like myself and all other WordPress user) a means of managing our blogs on the go. (So, to the good folks developing this app, “thank you.”)

Automattic has been kind enough to provide a list of upcoming bug fixes and features for the app. I didn’t see any of my ideas already listed there, but don’t doubt that as time passes, the app will become considerably more usable.

What features of the app do you find missing? And/or invaluable while on the go?

Update: Daniel Jalkut, author of MarsEdit, kindly offered a solution to the issue of Global Drafts, which ended up serving as a great workaround. (Thanks, Daniel! Anyone else know how to solve the remaining open 6 features?)

iPhone/iPod

Apple must be inundated with idea after idea on how to improve or really make the iPhone a better product. But, I won’t lie; the iPhone is an awesome device. I had a series of disappointing Verizon phones (preceeded by an equally disappointing SprintPCS phone) over 3 years. No matter what glitches I’ve experienced with the iPhone (and there have been a couple doozies), I actually feel empowered with my phone now… rather than crippled or limited. Anywhere I go, I have access (even if occasionally slow via the EDGE network) to my email, maps for directions, and my full address book. Not to mention some great games and my Google Reader newsfeeds.

That said, there’s room for improvement. Particularly around syncing, which I mentioned earlier as a .Mac feature. I can understand .Mac-like sync not being a feature available to every user, as someone has to pay for server storage of all that information. The following suggestions, though, would apply for any iPhone and/or iPod user straight out of the box.

• Shortcut creation (iPhone)

  I can’t say I’m a giant fan of the touchscreen’s keyboard on the iPhone. While some know me for my sissy-soft hands, my iPhone knows me for a different digited issue: fat fingers. And fat fingers make it hard to type (particularly quickly) on a small keyboard. To make matters worse, Apple’s auto-correction software somehow manages to bungle both my regular English words and my old SMS shorthand. “MTG” (“meeting”) becomes “MTV,” “WFH” (“working from home”) becomes “WTH,” etc.

  Worse, the software doesn’t learn. No matter how many times I type “MTG,” it keeps on thinking I mean MTV. The “S” in SMS stands for “Short.” Why can’t I send short, shorthand MSGs (not MAGS) to others? I can appreciate Apple’s efforts to make the world a more formal, English-literate place. Most of us, though, aren’t sending TXTs to the CEO. Let us use our efficient little lingua franca, please. And, show us a little love by learning it over time… make that auto-correction start suggesting the words I use. Particularly, my email address. (And, please, please stop auto-capitalizing my email address as soon as I add the “@” symbol.)

  As it stands, I somewhat dread SMSing on the iPhone, as I know I’ll have to think just to send my note. That sounds like a Windows experience to me; I prefer the Mac-way of doing things, thank you.

• CoverFlow browsing (iPod… and should be an iPhone issue, too!)

  iTunes 7.x and Mac OS X Leopard recently incorporated CoverFlow into their browsing experience, which provides a visual, flip-book-like approach to perusing music and data libraries. It rocks. I was sold the minute I first played with it. (After all, who doesn’t remember their LP/CD covers when thinking about their favorite albums?) It is so, so, so much more engaging than scrolling through a 12-point text list.

  

  iTunes display for music on Mac (left) and iPod (right).

  Sadly, though, when I browse the music on my iPod in iTunes, I’m presented with an old-school 12-point text list of all my tracks. What happened? I was just flipping through this beautiful presentation of the limited selection of music on my Mac, and when I switch to the pimped-out, 80GB iPod, I get the limited, pre-iTunes 7.x experience. Any reason I can’t have the big boys’ experience while viewing my iPod’s content, too?

• Don’t cripple iPod functionality on the iPhone (iPhone)

  Manual music management on my iPods rock. The reason I use an iPod in the first place (these days, at least) is that I don’t have to keep my entire music library on my limited-space laptop drive. By manually copying and managing tracks to my iPod, I can keep them there, and keep my hard drive free for data and work.

  Unfortunately, the iPhone allows no such similar functionality. The only way to get music on the device is to sync playlists from my Mac to my iPhone. Delete the track off my Mac? Next sync, its getting wiped off my iPhone.

  To make annoying matters worse, the iPhone also doesn’t let me play my music stored on it when plugged into my Mac. Why? This totally baffles me. The iPhone says “iPod” right on the package, as well as on its Home screen button. It shows up in iTunes like an iPod.

  So why can’t I stash and play my music? This has effectively killed the “iPod” component of the iPhone for me… the only time I use my iPods for music is when I plug them into my many different Macs.

• Do not disconnect! (iPod)

  Really?! From the company that brought hot-swapping drives mainstream? To this day, I need to manually “eject” my iPod from my Mac, waiting tens of seconds (usually 6 tens, to be precise) for my iPod to tidy up and close shop. Usually, the reason I need to remove the iPod is that I’m dashing off to a meeting, and don’t want to lug the iPod, its cable, and its charger along.

  Call me naive, but I believe that Apple can provide a simple, elegant, and little-chance-of-harm means of disconnecting iPods by simply unplugging the device. What can I say? I dare to dream.

Like I said, the iPhone (and the iPod) rocks. Apple could totally ignore these issues, and I’ll keep using them just the same. Only thing, though, is that a little piece of me will die each time I do, knowing they could have done just a little bit better.

(Ed. note: This is one of a several part series, already including .Mac, Customer Lifecycle and Apple.com User Profiles coverage. Stay tuned tomorrow for my final post re: Address Book.)

a computer’s software should break down the obstacles and bureaucracy that prevent efficiency in the real world and disguise how onerous the task may actually be.

As such, I end 2007 with my hopes for Apple in 2008; I write this not only as a fan, but also as a shareholder. (Steve, now that you’re an avid reader, here’s to hoping we see even some of this next year.)

.Mac

Many of my friends remember me hyping up the .Mac service for the past several years. The promise has always been great. Among other things, sync your files seamlessly (nee, Mac-like) between multiple Macs to have the same Address Book, Safari Bookmarks, Mail settings, application preferences, etc., everywhere you go… and always available “in the cloud” (up on the .Mac site). And indeed, it’s worked relatively well that way for years.

Unfortunately, the Web has grown at a clip that has far outpaced Apple in terms of updating the service. Matter of fact, Leopard and other Apple products are releasing base features that cannibalize the service’s utility: see the awesome Yahoo! Address Book sync between your iPhone, your OS X Address Book, and Yahoo! Mail/Messenger for but one example. .Mac users are getting upset, and it seems like high time to make some significant upgrades to the service.

I see a couple areas I’d particularly recommend for growth in the .Mac area:

• iPhone Sync
  Why did I invest .Mac’s promise of keeping my data “in the cloud” if their first truly portable, always-connected device can’t take advantage of the features? To get my iPhone in sync with very light data (Address Book updates, such as 10-digit phone numbers and 10k avatar images, and iCal events, such as 100-character meeting invites), I must plug my iPhone into my Mac and sync the two. I’ve never been in the habit of tethering my phone to my laptop or desktop, and have thus come to not rely on the iPhone for its Calendar and Address Book applications (both of which have data, believe it or not, which are updated multiple times each day). It would rock to have the iPhone syncing this data on-the-go, just as it does with my IMAP Mail account. (And, no, I shouldn’t have to shell out $400 for an updated iPhone just for this capability when the 3G version of the phone supports this feature.)
• Backup of iTunes purchases
  Apple clearly wants me to back up my iTunes purchases. I am solicited every so often in iTunes to use its internal backup feature (or the .Mac-supplied Backup application) to keep additional copies of my purchases. Why not automatically stockpile these tracks/videos/whatever in a Purchases folder on my iDisk? Storage is cheap; ask Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and all the other players offering ridiculously large amounts of storage for free to their users. You have them one-upped in a different area… your users already paid for the privilege of this particular content. Why not archive it for them automatically (and preferably not count this storage against their meager 10GB limit)?

  If not for altruistic, value-added, help-the-user reasons, then consider it for reducing customer support costs.

• Storage
  I began to cover this already, but it needs clarification. Everyone gripes about this. So maybe there’s a ring of truth to the fact that its a tad bit shameful to so excitedly hype 10GB of storage, when that’s freely offered from so many other services. Man up; we’re paying $100/year… try not to make us feel like chumps.

  20GB sound reasonable? I’d, of course, prefer 50GB, but I don’t want to sound greedy.

• Instant Gratification
  Apple has product marketing down like a science. Walk into an Apple store, and you want to touch and grab all the products displayed around you. The tiny software boxes beckon, and suggest the beauty of the objects inside. Interestingly, though, .Mac software boxes contain not much more than a generic manual and a unique product code. (AppleCare boxes share a similar issue; their boxes contain one additional item: a TechTool Deluxe DVD that can also be downloaded for easy burning later.)

  This isn’t too big a deal (although it seems strange that there isn’t a disc in the box, even if its just filled with demo versions of 3rd-party software) for the physical store… people came in to pick up a ‘thing.’ What’s odd, though, is that the online store sells the same physical product. This means if a user buys the product tonight from the online store, they will need to pay for shipping, wait several days, and then get a couple sheets of paper when it arrives. Aside from the environmental impact of packaging and delivery, it strikes me as odd that Apple (who pioneered digital downloads with iTunes) has to send a box.

  But wait… if a user simply clicks ‘Join Now’ on the .Mac homepage, they can get started using the service this minute. So it isn’t a requirement that a box be shipped; you just might think so, as the digital, far more convenient download option isn’t presented.

  I have two recommendations:

  1. At the online Apple Store, only sell the digital delivery of .Mac (or at least make the packaged version something the user has to take an additional step to select)
  2. At physical Apple Store locations, deliver the .Mac activation code as a print-out on a user’s receipt… kind of like the way gas stations do for carwashes

  Both solutions reduce the waste, and get the user directly to the goods. And aside that, there’s a little less disappointment this way than in opening a box (that holds discs and packaging for other Apple products, like iWork and iLife) to find a lonely sheet of paper.

.Mac still has considerable value to me for the data synchronization alone, but it would be great to see some of these issues resolved soon. Open-source alternatives to .Mac are appearing, and others are suggesting replicating most of .Mac’s offering with free alternatives. Time to stave off the antsy masses.

(Ed. note: This is the first of a several part series. Stay tuned for posts re: Address Book, Customer Lifecycle, Apple.com User Profiles, and iPhone/iPod/iTunes.)