Fixing .Mac - Idea 1: Hyperblog the Web

Apple's nebulous .Mac services were introduced in What the Heck is .Mac? In 10 Reasons Why Apple Can Kickstart Web 2.0, I presented why Apple is uniquely positioned to actually deliver .Mac services well worth the price of admission. In this series, I'll describe features I think Apple needs to add to move .Mac from "web hosting and email plus" to a complete suite of services that are valuable, obvious, and will sell themselves to potential subscribers. Plus, I want to use them!

Idea #1: Start by Empowering .Mac Members to Sort the Web for Interesting Content and Tag It Up

Borrows Ideas From:

Digg, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, Third Voice

Lots of existing websites already allow their community of members to submit web links of interesting content for indexing, sharing, and comment. Slashdot has a beta system for tagging submissions with metadata, while Digg users can give stories and comments a thumbs up or down, progressively raising or lowering an item's visibility. Third Voice was a dotcom that built an Internet Explorer plugin that allowed users to associate comments with websites, which then popped up like a Post It note for other users who had the plugin.

Why Apple Can Deliver this:

Apple could one-up existing services (and previous failures) by applying the company's unique position and abilities I described earlier. For starters, Apple has (1) a network of users, and (2) owns an OS and a browser. That means they can build functions into Safari and distribute the functionality with Mac OS X. The system would be (3) given away for free, and is financed as part of .Mac, which users (6) trust with their data. Further, Apple has proven they can build things that (7) work, are (8) usable by mere mortals, (9) very cool, and (10) will actually get finished.

Here's how it works:

Using Safari, .Mac members would submit an article and rate it, in iPod fashion, with a number of stars. They can also add comments and apply metadata tags that describe the material they are submitting.

Those ratings, comments, and tags (which I'll collectively call hyperblog) are sent to Apple's servers, where they would be aggregated to dynamically build web pages and RSS feeds of popular, regional, and categorized content, as well as sorted hyperblog listings by submitter, recency, or amount of associated discussion.

In addition to finding and sorting articles, .Mac would also let members tag articles or entire websites with user created, peer reviewed metadata tags, such as "kid friendly" or "mature content," "sensationalist garbage," "phishing/spyware/fraud alert," "harvested content for search engine spamming," or "insightful commentary."

Members could also tag pages or entire websites with links to related content such bibliographic references, or alternative points of view on the subject. Essentially, it would be a meta-wiki for the web.

To broaden interest in the system and direct attention to .Mac, Apple would need to allow anyone to freely access and use the RSS feeds of hyperblog ratings, tags, and comments submitted by .Mac users, and supply open source tools to allowing anyone to view hyperblog live, using any browser and any platform. For example, search engines could access .Mac hyperblog to identify SEO fraud on the pages they index.

Another unique feature Apple can add comes from the security of Apple's .Mac membership. Anonymous vandals or bots couldn't contribute to the system, so there's much less spamming to worry about.

In addition to providing hyperblogging tools, Safari also needs the ability to display quick access to a web pages' whois registration details. I don't know why browsers don't already do that, but it would help stop phishing fraud. Additionally, it would allow users to look up relationships between web sites' registration details, so that questionable pages could be cross referenced against those already reported for spam or fraud activity.

The web isn't the only Internet service that can be tagged with metadata. Members receiving spam or viruses via email could report it via a button in Mail, which would similarly relay the content to Apple's servers for aggregating. This would allow Apple to intelligently and effectively create blacklists, or quarantine items, or adjust their gateway spam and virus scanning heuristics to catch messages like it, or from the same spammer. Nothing is more frustrating than getting spam, but knowing there is nothing you can do to stem the tide. Apple, here's a major bullet point you can add to .Mac services: an army of spam killers on your side!

Blam! Apple's .Mac could not only become the way to talk about the web, but also help clean up the web, and email, for everyone else, too. Such a system would also spur third party innovation and create far better ways to find and evaluate web content than Google provides today. Search engines are getting so overwhelmed with SEO garbage that the value of their results are plummeting. But that’s another topic I’ll get into later.