Spymac
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Spymac is a web magazine with a community comprised largely of Apple Macintosh users. Providing news, reviews, features, message boards, email, web hosting, and image gallery, Spymac members can also host their own blog, online calendar and forum.
Spymac was founded in late 2001 as a Macintosh enthusiast site, by Kevin April and Holger Ehlis, going by the member names "AtariST" and "Nostradamus". One of Spymac's early stories concerned the iWalk, a supposed Apple PDA that was to be released on October 23, 2001. The photographs and description were shown to be a hoax, possibly based on the rumors generated by the iPod's development (the iPod was unveiled on the iWalk's purported release date). Early in 2002, Spymac reported on the upcoming release of a similar product, again called iWalk. This article, complete with video of the supposed device, was not conclusively debunked, but numerous criticisms of the video cast doubt on its authenticity. As of 2006, Apple has not produced a new PDA. While Spymac has claimed in both cases to be a victim of the hoaxes, many detractors have accused the site of faking the material itself. Spymac now provides paid and free Internet services which are listed below. Nearly one million members have joined the site, though it is unknown how many are currently active accounts.
Spymac launched the Internet's first public 1 GB email service, Spymac Mail, in April of 2004. This announcement came days after Gmail's heavily publicized beta launch. For a while, Spymac also produced its own line of notebook cases, computer accessories and office furniture, which could be purchased via Spymac's Online Shop.
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[edit] Products and Services
Spymac - Spymac offers a group of free services available to all members, web hosting, iCal hosting, member profile, member forum, blog and photo sharing through the Spymac gallery.
Gallery - An open-to-all-members image gallery at Spymac. The Gallery allows users to upload their photographs and have them rated by peers for whatever qualities the photos may possess.
Spymac Club - Due to be released on September 1st 2005, but delayed until mid-November 2005, Club replaced Spymac's Wheel and MailPro services. Club aims to offer one of the web's easiest-to-use blogs, a homepage with a large amount of storage and much more. It includes Spymac's new suite of Internet-aware applications that allow access and control of Spymac features from a user's desktop.
[edit] Defunct Services
Free e-mail accounts - Spymac used to offer free 25 MB e-mail accounts for all members and increased the storage amount to 1 GB in April 2004, a move that brought Spymac significant publicity. The resulting surge of membership proved problematic for Spymac and the service had been plagued with reliability issues. Since April 2006, Spymac does not offer any free e-mail accounts anymore to new members. Existing members were allowed to keep their accounts if they "verified" their membership by sending in a small Paypal payment or by SMS on their mobile phone. However, users who missed the deadline for verification had their accounts deleted.
Spymac Hosting - Paid internet hosting that let users host their site with the same technology and in the same location as Spymac.com. In June 2006, Spymac turned all hosting accounts over to SpaceTrend, a service run by David Stonies, a friend of the Spymac system administrator Dominic Geisler.[1] According to Spymac staff, the reason for the sale was "our inability to provide the level of service you expect."[1]
However, Spymac is still deeply connected to SpaceTrend. See the SpaceTrend panel login, click cancel and a white page with a Spymac logo on it. Furthermore, it appears that there was indeed no physical server change. Note that the contents of ftp://ftp.spymac.com and ftp://ftp.clano-it.com are exactly the same. An internal/clano-it.com directory is also present with additional config files.
Spymac Wheel - A now defunct service, replaced by Club. Wheel included software for either Mac OS X or Windows users and included Spymac Mail Pro (3GB of email storage), iCal and Web page hosting and an application to upload to a user's 'Spydisk'.
Spymac MailPro - Now defunct - replaced by Club. Members received an advertisement-free 3 GB e-mail account that included IMAP, POP and Web-mail access, desktop syncing, spam and virus filters, and (in the US and Canada) cell-phone integration.
Spymac Shop - No longer in use - An online shop providing a range of items, from clothing, notebook bags, and office furniture.
[edit] The Apple Collection
The website http://www.theapplecollection.com is a part of the Spymac Network. The Apple Collection looks through the internet and collects pictures which contain the Apple logo. It provides galleries of these images listed by category and many desktop pictures.
In the past, the site has also taken pictures from Spymac galleries without the permission of the person who uploaded the work. As the Spymac galleries are not allowed to contain copyrighted content (it is against the terms of service and can result in being banned from the site; Spymac has stated that it has taken people to court regarding copyright infringement) it should be assumed that the content uploaded is original work. The owner of the Apple Collection, David Vincent, claims that he has an agreement with Spymac which allows him to take an image (or part of an image) from the Spymac galleries to display on his website. Spymac denies any such agreement exists.[2]
[edit] Contests
Spymac regularly has contests and giveaways involving prizes. The website has given away iPods, iPod minis, Spymac Sunglasses, Wheel subscriptions and many other items to its community. However, some prizes are open to everyone - even if they are not a member of the community.
[edit] Comments & Criticisms
The Spymac website, Spymac mail and almost all other features had been experiencing excessive amounts of downtime since Spymac announced the long transition to version 4. This caused many members (especially paying members) a lot of frustration. This problem was unresolved and ongoing from September 1, 2005 when version 4 was launched up until the Spymac website went down unannounced on 7th April, being replaced with an advertisement for Spymac V, the fifth incarnation of the website.
Some prizes have been offered but not received. One member had to wait over ten months (since 29th December 2004) for a promised prize, and - despite numerous emails and discussions with site staff - he only received one issue of the "years subscription to a magazine" he actually won. [2][3] Spymac's explanation is that the magazine in question was delayed with its first issue, and that it is published in the US while the prize winner lives in the UK; however it is clear that Spymac failed to make sure this prize was delivered to the recipient, as air mail is quite obviously not that slow, and the first issue can hardly be delayed by more than two months.
Judy Westcott, a contributing writer for Spymac, wrote an article in which she missed linking in the story, a link which provided the original information being discussed in the article. An apology by Westcott was issued for the omission of the link to the original story, and the omission was corrected. While some individuals had asserted the article was plagiarized, the issue of the missing link was quickly resolved when it was discovered and the story corrected within a 24 hour time period. Both articles contained the sentence: "HP will also provide Lucasfilm its high-end StorageWorks xp12000 disk array, which boasts 35 terabytes (define) of storage capacity." The word "(define)" was a hyperlink on the Internet News site (which explained the word "terabytes"), which as a result of Westcott's copy and pasting, made no sense in the Spymac version of the article. The plagiarism was pointed out by Spymac member "mduell". Spymac article Internet News article
Throughout January 2006, Spymac faced a lot of criticisms. Many members, even a few devoted ones that have been there for a while, left the community. On January 27th, 2006, moderators adbmice, derigueurmortis, deurser01, Edg, jeffaarontaylor, kittykat84, RedRock, samh004 and Whosawhatsis sent Spymac a letter of resignation. In brief, they felt that Spymac seemed to care less about the community and more about themselves as a corporation. They disliked that Spymac had taken the responsibilities of suspending and banning members out of the hands of moderators and given them to Spymac Tech Support team, whose time could have been better spent fixing problems and whom they considered to be grossly incompetent and unqualified for these duties. Deurser01 has since rejoined the team.
On January 30, 2006, Spymac ceased POP services to all free accounts, thus cutting off one of the service's major appeals. Spymac has also started inserting text-based ads throughout the site, including user-submitted posts. This has angered many members, arguing that Spymac is haphazardly using their words without consent to endorse a product that the writer may not endorse. As of mid-February, the text-based advertisements have reportedly been restricted to the news articles and are no longer supposed to appear in members' posts or Gallery comments. FTP access to Spymac for free members was also restricted permanantly (in Spymac 3 paid members were able to use a Web-based FTP system, or WebDAV.)
On Friday April 7, 2006 the Spymac site went down without any warning given to either their free or paying customers. Spymac replaced its website with an advertisement for Spymac V due to be released sometime in April 2006 (along with a link to their webmail and some wallpapers). Spymac V went live on April 14, 2006 looking strikingly similar to version 4, apart from a handful of new features (mostly planned, but not yet fully functional) and an increase in the amount of advertisements for non-paying members. The amount of bugs and non-functionality in version V has led many members to make comments on the Spymac forums claiming that they have rushed out yet another version of their website before it had been finished or tested sufficiantly (as they did previously with version 4). It is uncertain whether Spymac will have a fully functioning version of their website or whether Spymac V will continue along the same vein as the troubled Spymac 4.
Also during this time free email accounts that had not been verified were deleted, even though some holders of free accounts had not been notified of the need to verify. The verification process itself didn't always work, and some users who tried to verify lost their email accounts anyway.
In response to the frustration over unkept promises and spotty accessibility, AtariST promised Club subscriptions would be extended for a year. Spymac also announced and began touting an upcoming new release of Spymac, code-named "Leapfrog", which aims to solve the problems that occurred in versions 4 and 5 as well as offer new features.
On the 6th of June, 2006, Spymac received it's 1,000,000th (one-millionth) registered member. However, how many of these users are actually active, and not cloned accounts remains unclear.
Dozens of sites, a few of which are listed in the External Links section of this article, have been formed by members wishing to leave Spymac in an attempt to re-invent the sense of community that Spymac once possessed before it became the more commercially orientated venture that many believe it to be today. These sites are often made up of disenfranchised members of the Spymac community or Spymac members who decided to move on to pastures new when Spymac was experiencing one of its more excessive amounts of downtime. Whilst some intend to imitate 'old Spymac', many others have branched out to become unique communities in their own right.
[edit] External links
- Spymac home page
- Spymac's webmail launch announcement
- Spymac moderator letter of resignation
- Mellaflusia site, one of the first and most prominent community sites originally made up from ex-Spymac members. The community is very similar to early Spymac, and focuses on all aspects of creativity.
- Another spin-off forum created by ex-Spymac members
- Maclectic online Mac forums and more. Started as a BBS in 1986. Many Spymac members frequent and mod this site.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ This hand-off to an unproven service closely connected to Spymac and the manner in which it was executed created significant controversy. For example, Spymac "forgot" to charge its hosting customers for over a year, which some members interpreted as compensation for inadequate service. SpaceTrend now demanded payment not only for these past times, but also for up to a year in the future, even if the customer did not wish to stay with SpaceTrend. To enforce these demands, customers' websites were replaced with a generic SpaceTrend placeholder and David Stonies refused to transfer the domains back into customers' control. More details: Spymac-Clanotopia-Spacetrend blog
- ^ A site containing a statement from TheAppleCollection.com owner Mr David Vincent, regarding his belief of an agreement between Spymac and himself, which allows him to take images from the Spymac gallery. It also features the excerpt from the Spymac Terms of Service which gives their stance on copyright infringement, and what actions they have supposedly taken against it. VeryBerry vs. TAC/Spymac
