Apple says that Apple.com receives 9.5 million page views per week. That places them as one of the most popular sites on the net. Apple has decided to harness those numbers and increase them through three new additions to Apple.com, iReview, iCards and iTools.

iReview is a directory of web sites that Apple reviews and grades. We came, we saw, we were unimpressed, we left, we'll not come back. Next.

iCards is an Internet greeting card service where you can send an image to someone along with a note inside the image. Apple has licensed a number of images including fine art from the likes of Monet. Apparently Internet greeting cards are extremely popular but I fail to see the appeal.

0 for 2…it's not looking good. But then there's iTools, Internet features that integrate with Mac OS 9. As of today, Apple has four iTools. Email is just that, it gives you an e-mail address at mac.com. KidSafe is an Internet filtering system that is designed to protect kids from harmful content. Instead of blocking out keywords like "sex" or known adult sites, KidSafe blocks everything but approved sites, which currently number over 55,000. Apple will be continually adding sites approved by educators. KidSafe interfaces with multi-user access in OS 9 to let you enable kid safe for some users (like your children) and not others (like yourself). It looks like a great boon to worried parents.

iDisk is an impressive utility that gives you twenty megs of space on Apple's servers. You can access your twenty megs of space over the Internet by actually mounting the space on your desktop as if it were a hard drive or normal network volume. You can set public and private spaces within your twenty megs, which allows you to share some files and keep others private. While twenty megs of free space is nothing special, its incredibly tight integration with the Mac OS is. You can even make custom iCards using photos you've uploaded to your iDisk.

And the last part of iTools is HomePage, Apple's free web site server. In addition to giving you free hosting, HomePage includes site creation software that, according to Jobs, will enable you to create a page within ten minutes. He's right, you can create a site extremely quickly, but what you get is essentially a canned and uninteresting picture gallery.