Well, after spending over TWO hours with Apple support, who have always been great, I discovered, that the problem was due me inadvertently blocking the ports that communicate back to the Apple servers. You see, I use LittleSnitch to protect my machine from the bad guys, but in so doing, I mistakenly closed off the ports that communicate with me.com. I won’t go into the details as to how I figured this out, because it took over two hours of troubleshooting until I determined what the casue was. Suffice it to say that once I opened the ports, reset my password, I was good to go and now my password works across all my Apple services.

The point that I am making is that even those among us are considered “power” users, can screw things up and get in the way of things working the way they are supposed to work. I was cussing Apple all day and it turned out that it was ME along!

In the future the Internet will know Me, it will be incredibly simple, in as much as the protocol (HTTP) that binds all of these walled gardens together will support new information about Me… and I will be able to control who gets to really know Me.

MobileMe is a great idea, lack of execution notwithstanding – but the real power comes when the internet knows Me. And that chapter hasn’t been written yet, or should I say, it’s in draft mode right now.

It’s doubly strange to me because Apple could make MobileMe into a real competitive advantage against Google. Apple’s strategy is generally threefold: 1) create lustworthy hardware, 2) create software products (iWork, iLife, Aperture) which follow the hardware theme of well thought out and easy to use products which hide complexity to gain mass market appeal and amortise the cost of these products so through large scale purchasing and 3) behind the scenes linking products which add value to any and all Apple products which are already owned (iTunes, MobileMe, Find my phone, Bonjour, QuickTime, etc).

I can’t believe that MobileMe is a very important revenue tool as it stands but it could play such an important role in binding an Apple CPU user to the whole Apple ecosystem. If it were free IMO it would bring benefits far outweighing the costs. Like Facebook’s attempts to create an insular world/”walled garden” in its battle against Google, MobileMe with cloud based iWork and iTunes could play an important role in keeping Apple users in Apple’s walled garden, increasing the motivation to buy yet more Apple hardware and btw weaken its chief anagonist Google.

Perhaps the new data centre is gearing up for such a role. Apple has shown itself to lack the kind of innovative vision with cloud services which power the rest of its product line. Surely things must be changing, someone at Apple must “get it” but right now I hold on to MobileMe out of loyalty to Apple. Disclosure: I own AAPL and given what the stock has done for me, my MobileMe account seems justified. For others…?

Slow: Why is MobileMe so slow? I have had simple operations actually time-out.

Undependable: I once tried (shame on me) to sync *two* computers with my iDisk. Eventually the iDisk became un-sync-able with either computer and I lost data in the process. Even syncing with only one computer can be problematic: Every time I edit a file directly on my iDisk from another Mac, syncing fails initially on the synced Mac. And, of course, the process for all but the simplest syncs takes forever.

AddressBook: Why are there dozens of repeated entries when I sync my iPhone?

I see a lot of chatter about these problems (and more), so those who have issues with Mobile are not alone, nor do they suffer in silence. The puzzle is why it has taken Apple so long to do anything about it. I cannot claim to be over comforted by Steve Jobs’ assurances that things get better. We’ve heard that before.

what he failed to realize is improvements mean change, they changed/improved how the syncing works… when you you do this, things go wrong with old syncing…

and the only way you are going to get this to work is by wiping and resyncing after such improvements… (should it just work, well yes.. but we are in the baby stages of the cloud, so deal with it)

such is change… (the only real thing Apple did wrong was begin to charge for the service, a 100 million users would still be on mobileMe if not for that… all demanding change/improvements quicker) and we’d be on to even more advanced criticism of some other new feature, instead of these few features.

watch what happens when ChromeOS has a few “updates” in their future…(well once the vaporware is actual ware).. trusting your data to a cloud like this… well… it is great for a backup safety, but for your primary… have fun with that google.

imagine what the person says when his “syncing” goes wrong in a Cloud only enviro… then looks for a way to find his old data. i can see the howls now.

but keep up with the crits of MoblieMe… unfortunately since it is overpriced, we only get a few crits every once in a while, where if it were still free, these crits would have moved on to even more handy features.

Amen on Dropbox. So easy! It’s making me forget to use Mobile Me.