Spymac was an online

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...

and rumour site launched at the end of 2001 by Holger Ehlis and Kevin April, which grew to be the largest Macintosh community at the time, having around 600,000 users and 25 employees as of 2004. Spymac was known for innovative marketing and technology that led to its growth, such as the first-to-market 1GB

email service A mailbox provider, mail service provider or, somewhat improperly, email service provider is a provider of email hosting. It implements email servers to send, receive, accept, and store email for other organizations or end users, on their behalf. ...

, which launched even before Google's Gmail, causing an influx of new users, and Wheel, a suite of online services that competed with Apple's

.Mac MobileMe (branded iTools between 2000 and 2002; .Mac until 2008) is a discontinued subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc. All services were gradually transitioned to and eventually replaced by the ...

, which included the aforementioned email service,

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", w ...

s, and website hosting. However, outcry over the site's "Leapfrog" redesign, which followed Web 2.0 principles, lead to many long-time users leaving. The redesign marked a transition for the site, which switched away from being a Mac forum to a video upload site that paid users a portion of advertising revenue. By March 2007, the site had over one million users.

References

{{reflist Macintosh websites Internet forums English-language websites Internet properties established in 2001 Video hosting American companies established in 2001 Social media companies of the United States Defunct companies based in New York City Privately held companies of the United States