.Mac Groups

» see groups.mac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Groups sat inside .Mac, the $99-a-year subscription Apple sold between 2002 and 2008, and it was never the reason anyone bought one. The headline features were the mac.com email address and the iDisk. Groups was further down the page, and what it did was let a member create a small closed space and invite people into it: a private website only the members could reach, carrying a message board that also worked as a mailing list, so a post showed up both on the page and in everyone's inbox. Apple threw in a pool of shared storage for the group to use.

Apple's own QuickTour page for it is archived from 1 October 2005, with a language switcher offering Japanese and German beside the English, and that capture is the earliest hard evidence of the feature existing. When .Mac became MobileMe in July 2008 the feature carried over mostly unchanged, which in retrospect is how you could tell nobody at Apple was working on it.

I was a Windows person through all of this. In 2005 I was building PCs and putting the parts list in my forum signature, and a hundred dollars a year in foreign currency for Apple web services was not a thing anyone around me was buying. Groups was for a family or a club that already owned Macs together, and in Turkey that group barely existed yet.

~ the dossier ~

~ seven july ~

On 9 April 2009 Apple announced that both HomePage and Groups would be switched off on 7 July. MacRumors ran it at 5:33 pm Pacific that Thursday under the headline "Apple to Discontinue .Mac HomePage and Groups". Glenn Fleishman logged it the same afternoon on It Died, his blog of hosted services in the process of dying, and his post is the one that recorded what would actually happen to the data.

The two products got different treatment, which is the detail worth keeping. HomePage was frozen rather than deleted: published pages stayed online at their existing addresses but could no longer be edited or removed, so a page about your cat from 2005 became permanent whether you wanted it or not. Groups got no such reprieve. The features were going to stop working on the date, full stop.

~ the archive folder ~

What happened to the content is the part that reads oddly now. Everything a group had posted was moved into a folder named "Groups Archive" on the iDisk belonging to whoever had created the group. One person's cloud drive, chosen by the accident of who had clicked create first.

That folder then had three years to live. iDisk went down with the rest of MobileMe on 30 June 2012, and unless the owner had pulled the archive onto a real disk before then, the second shutdown finished what the first one started. Apple did eventually rebuild shared spaces into iCloud, in the form of shared albums and shared folders, but nothing came back that looked like a group with its own address and its own mailing list.

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