Michael Arrington posted a great analysis of Why the New .Mac Webmail is Important: “What users want is a rich internet interface for email. What they don’t want is four different interfaces for four different email accounts. What Yahoo and Apple get, and what Google and Microsoft don’t, is that to “own” the user you have to allow them to access competitor’s services as well as your own. Google has the best pure free internet service on the Internet. But they don’t have the best interface. Yahoo does. And now Apple is combining the power of Yahoo’s open approach to email with the ability to sync their service to a desktop client.”
What I also really like about this post is the fact that it’s offering insight and value judgments, not just news. That’s part of what we try to do at Radar as well: identify news items that are important signposts of a coming future, or else that point up choices that users can make to help shape the futures they want.
Techcrunch commenter Daniel Tschentscher got it exactly right when he tied Michael’s post to the idea of an email address as a key to the user’s identity, and as a result, how important it is that that identity (and its associated data) be portable and accessible from anywhere. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft should take notice!