Why I Would Love a MobileMe-Branded Feeds Reader, and Why It Would Matter to Us, Users

MobileMe is the subscription-based service created by Apple to compete with Google’s apps. Priced $99, it includes Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Gallery and iDisk.

I have owned a MobileMe account last year, and when it came the time to renew it last September I blindly refused. My main point was that I had the exact same benefits while using Google apps — but best of all — they were free!

Since then, one year has passed. I have seen many concerns rise about privacy. Google and then Facebook have been publicly criticized over their privacy policy and the use they made of our data. As my Information System teacher puts it:

When you sign up on Facebook, you agree to give all your personal data to a company that provides you back with an apparently free service.

What is true to Facebook is also true to Google. When you, and I, signed up for Gmail we agreed to let Google see and use our personal data in exchange for a free service.

What Google does, as harmless as it may sound, is putting ads on the pages we visit. Moreover, they use our data to target the ads they deliver, in order to suit our tastes.

As long as Google is in a state of monopoly, it has no reason to do something else with my data. My main concern is, what will happen when Google looses its monopoly?

On the other hand, the sole fact of buying a MobileMe plan creates de facto a legal link between the user and Apple. I will never be concerned about how Apple uses my data because if Apple does use it in a bad way, I will have the right to take legal action.

That is not saying that I would not have the right to do it against Google, but it would be far easier against a company with which I have a commercial contract.

Anyway, I am not crusading against Google or Facebook here. What I would like is for Apple to include a feeds reader in MobileMe. That way, I would be able to ditch my Google account and migrate over MobileMe. And protect my personal data while I still can.

Finally, as Jim Ray puts it — talking about the new twitter —, Google products are engineered rather than designed:

they work at a place that values design, not algorithmically selected shades of blue

What could be better than a web-based feeds reader designed by Apple?