I was just jumping around on the Apple site when I clicked on the .mac page and was suddenly reminded of something I had thought of a while back. That being why is it that companies like Microsoft and Apple don’t design their software so that any information from their products can be transferred or uploaded to any web location of their choice? Of course the primary answer here is money. Why make their products compatible with any web/ftp/rss transfer mode when they can charge a monthly fee to use their proprietary hosting services. The real question here is how long will this last before their customers demand this openness.
For example, Mac OS X already has RSS features within it and Windows Vista will have RSS as a core part of the operating system as well. Imagine if iPhoto allowed you to upload your photos to any web space of your choice (utilizing your templates to do so) or even better did it in the background automatically. Imagine going to someone’s site and seeing a list of their latest bookmarks, music, photos, videos all posted their automatically because the user just clicked a single checkbox in the software somewhere to “Share” that information with others.