willregister's Profile

I just read this article and the comments and thought that I would post, the first thing I noticed was that while registering to post I was asked to input my income. So perhaps AppleMatters "uses" your data in the same way as Google, yet no-one has mentioned that in any of the comments above! Anyway, back to the topic in question, like Chris I too have decided to end my dot mac subscription. It has served me well, but my needs have changed to I must change with them. When I first got .mac I had just come over from the pc world and the anti-virus offered as part of the package made it all worth while to me. Little did I know, that soon this would be no longer available to me (I seem to recall that it wasn't Tiger compatible), then as I learned more about Macs I realized that viruses are not something to be too worried about, but lets not open that discussion. I was unable to work during the time that iWeb was launched, I played with it heavily using .mac, and I must say that publishing websites is very easy, I will miss that integration. But I have a new host, for less cost and also the servers are much faster, yes I lose some integration, but overall I am happy. I have also found that using FileZilla I don't spend too much time publishing via ftp. Syncing with .mac, I don't honestly remember the last time this actually worked for me. I don't think that I have had a true reflection of my computer on .mac for two or more years. Onto email, I do hear all of the privacy concerns about google, but I use gmail and love it, the simple way to stop getting the advertising links is to use Mail to send and fetch your email (Either POP or IMAP). This way you can avoid being "pestered" while reading your email. Personally this has never bothered me, and I have always found the gmail web interface much faster and easier to use than .mac. I have also found that to simply publish some pictures of my baby for the family to see, I can use Picasa and the gmail account that I set up for him! I can export straight out of iPhoto and my wife can also publish and maintain them from her pc, cross platform integration! Dot mac definitely has a place and I cant really disagree with the reasoning behind using it, but for me its time to move on :)