User:CastAStone/Spymac

Spymac is a virtual community where users can upload, view, and share video clips, audio clips and images online. Spymac also features member profiles, blogs, member forums and a variety of other free and paid services. Users are encouraged to earn money from their content via a monthly jackpot based upon the popularity of their uploads and ability to garner adertising revenue for the site. Whilst now primarily a Web 2.0 multimedia share site (combining elements similar to YouTube, Flickr and MySpace) Spymac still caters for the residual Apple Mac based user community (from its original incarnation) now located at the subdomain http://classic.spymac.com, although in the wake of their success as a multimedia website they have currently ceased development of the 'classic' side and its future remains uncertain

Macintosh
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 2007, Apple has not produced a new PDA (though the iPhone contains several PDA-like features). 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.

Email
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.

Leapfrog
Spymacs most recent incarnation (codenamed 'Leapfrog') is a foray into the online world of media sharing, where users can share a variety of audio/visual media, embed the content elsewhere online and interact with each other through comments and user profiles. Users can also earn money from their uploads through an ad revenue share scheme.

Classic
Since the advent of 'Leapfrog' the Apple Mac based user community with which Spymac originally gained its popularity is now no longer the focus of the website. The old website can still be accessed through the subdomain http://classic.spymac.com although it is not fully functional, many of the functions are broken and Spymac have announced on several occasions that they have no plans to develop classic further, recommending 'classic members' to find or form a community elsewhere

Over a million members have reportedly joined the site since 2001, though it is unknown how many are currently active accounts.

Products and Services
Media sharing - A free image/audio/video sharing service which allows users to upload images/audio/videos, have them rated by peers, gather them into collections for a slideshow and embed them on other websites. Users can also earn money from their uploads via a monthly jackpot based upon their popularity and ability to garner adertising revenue for the site.

Community - Spymac offers a clutch of free services available to all members, including a member profile, a member forum and a blog (accessible through the classic subdomain)

Spymac Club - Spymac's suite of Internet-aware applications that allow access and control of Spymac features from a user's desktop (accessible through the classic subdomain)

Gold - A series of enhanced capabilities for uploading/downloading, ad removal, profile 'pimping' and collections. Available as separate items or together as part of a Full gold package.

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 no longer offers free e-mail accounts 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. According to Spymac staff, the reason for the sale was "our inability to provide the level of service you expect."

Spymac Wheel - This is now 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 - This is now 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 - This was an online shop providing a range of items, from clothing, notebook bags, and office furniture.

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.

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.

Comments & criticisms
Spymac was heavily criticized for the botched launch of version 4 of the site's web operating system. Slated to launch on September 1, 2005, it appeared a few days later without any of the community elements in place. Many of the problems were never fixed during the version's lifespan. Many members, even ones that have been there for a while, left the community during this time.

On January 27, 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 rejoined the team as a moderator, a few months later, and later was promoted to community administrator. He has since retired from the administrative position.

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 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 sufficiently (as they did previously with version 4). V faced many of the same issues as 4; 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 January 1, 2007, Spymac's news page was replaced with an advertisement for Leapfrog: The year of the Leapfrog is near. On January 7, 2007. Spymac introduced a beta form of their new website, which added new services to the website, such as webcam features, more interconnectivity between users, more pay-based features, and support for more languages. The site has received criticism for the design being very similar to YouTube, as well as attempting to be cutting edge instead of focusing on its community, to simple hatred of the mascot, a frog-like creature. Some members became discouraged over the transitions and simply left. A testing password was leaked by a separate online community, iVirtua Community, which meant that the public saw screenshots and gained access to Leapfrog, sparking the first heated and controversial debate.

Some prizes have been offered but not received. One member had to wait over ten months (since 29 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. 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

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 permanently (in Spymac 3 paid members were able to use a Web-based FTP system, or WebDAV.) 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.

On the 6th of June, 2006, Spymac received its 1,000,000th (one millionth) registered member. However, how many of these users are actually active remains unclear. Nor is it clear how many may be multiple accounts (i.e. more than one account per actual user), and/or whether it is simply a tally of all accounts ever created.