Apple to revamp and rename .Mac?

Many reports recently indicated that Apple may be preparing to revamp and rebrand its .Mac web service, here's a recap of what is known and what is expected.

On May, TUAW had already made claims that Apple would revamp its service sometime around the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and may use the ActiveSync license it bought for the iPhone so as to bring Exchange syncing.

More recently, several bloggers noticed that Apple has recently modified the code source of its .Mac web site as well as some parts of the latest mac OS X Leopard Update 10.5.3 so as to be able to replace the brand ".Mac" by something else. In iCal's code we can even find the following text "%@ is the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac)".

When MacRumors, related the story about the .Mac revamp last Friday, it suggested Apple could use the "Mobile Me" brand registered at the Patents and Trademarks Office a while ago.

But John Gruber who's running DaringGireball.net speculated the fact that new name of the service could simply be "Me", as Me.com, which currently redirects to the Snappville.com social networking site, appears to actually be owned by Apple itself.

Gruber points out that this domain is registered through MarkMonitor domain service, which is usually used by Apple for its domains and the whois information has the "eddingsk@apple.com" email address listed.

Last year, we had also reported about a major revamp on the .Mac service last year as our sources were indicating that the new service would rely on Google's infrastructure so as to provide a more attractive offering to its customers.