Apple Computer sent a note this week that there will be an eight hour downtime for .Mac next weekend. The email (pictured) seems to leave a few things to wonder about. First of all, the message says New iChat sessions will be temporarily unavailable, what does this mean. Does it mean that if you use AIM and have iChat as your client you won't be able to start a new IM session, or just not log in?

OK so it seems the answer would be to go to the support page suggested. Of course it says nothing about the outage and does not answer the questions.

Does the outage have anything to do with the release of the new iLife next Friday? Are they preparing for an influx of sharing or something else? It seems pretty drastic to take a commercial service offline for eight hours, even if they are generally the least intrusive eight contiguous hours of a week. It also hints that they are "enhancing" their service. Does this mean we'll see new features next week?