ReadWriteWeb

If you are an Apple MobileMe customer, now is the time to start planning your transition to Apple's iCloud service as some parts of MobileMe are going away. While the move from MobileMe to iCloud is bound to be rocky, the good news is that there are third-party alternatives. However, there are some services that people have taken for granted which just won't be available when Apple pulls the plug on MobileMe next summer. While Apple never really seemed all that committed to MobileMe anyway, many of its features didn't keep pace with the competition. And with some planning and exploration of alternatives, other MobileMe users are likely to find they've wound up in a better place as well.

Let's take a meeting. Somewhere. Most of us hate going to meetings, and the promise of the Internet is that you can meet virtually in a chat room or using desktop video conferencing. But first you have to figure out a common time when to meet.

There are a variety of services available to help; most that use a Web browser and many are free or inexpensive. But there are different situations because not every meeting is held under the same circumstances.

The weekend is the perfect time to get started on computer projects that you just didn't have time for during the week. This weekend, my project of choice is backups. Although I can safely say that the majority of my files are (relatively) safe in the cloud, it never hurts to make a run through and upload those that got overlooked.

My documents are spread out across Google Docs, Office Live, SkyDrive, and Box.net. My photos are on flickr and Facebook. My music and video collections are backed up locally to multiple external drives (since I'm too cheap to pay for the hundreds of gigs of online storage needed), but one thing that wasn't backed up anywhere but on my own PC was the thing that may be the most important of all: my iPhone.

Apple once again had to accept defeat and has announced that it will extend all subscriptions to its bug-ridden MobileMe service for yet another 60 days. This move comes after the company already gave every subscriber an extra 30 days after the botched launch of the product in July. MobileMe is quickly becoming Apple's most public failure in recent years - when the service first opened, it was basically rendered non-functional for the first couple of days, after that, a good number of users stopped receiving email, calendars disappeared or didn't sync, and the service often simply didn't work.