Nice article. People should realize it is not a good idea to leave data in the hands of third parties with commercial interests.
On the other hand, I see only technical people being able to escape such data traps.
Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
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Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#12What can we do for translated versions? I'm not a dev but my father uses google calendar a lot because it's easy and intuitive but he knows nothing about english...
It's not like he has to lean much english.
New appointment, alarm, the days of the week, etc.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#13One of the problems with using a self-hosted alternative like this is the fact that Google open up a lot of their services through APIs which other applications then consume. A web app I wrote a couple of years ago is one example (meetingShed). This easy integration with other apps opens up a lot of possibilities, but is there an alternative with ownCloud? It would be really interesting to see if a solution could be developed to expose self-hosted services (dynamically located) through a publicly accessible API (statically located).
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#14Nice URL and "Error establishing a database connection". I smell Wordpress.
Here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#15One of the problems with using a self-hosted alternative like this is the fact that Google open up a lot of their services through APIs which other applications then consume. A web app I wrote a couple of years ago is one example (meetingShed). This easy integration with other apps opens up a lot of possibilities, but is there an alternative with ownCloud? It would be really interesting to see if a solution could be…
The solution is trivial - just have some json in a specific format. The problem is getting everyone to agree on a standard and to get big players like Google, MS, Yahoo to use the standard.
To be honest though, there doesn't really seem to be much effort to even try - maybe someone famous will step forward and get the ball rolling?
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#16Thanks for the article! I didn't hear about ownCloud (or similar projects) before, I'm already reading manual (http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/) and will be installing ownCloud on my VPS today. I had doubts about giving Google (or any other company) so much of my data (not only emails, but schedule, contacts etc.) - now I found a great solution. I love HN.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#17Is there something like ownCloud that uses Python/PostgreSQL? I don't really want to pollute my server with MySQL/PHP.
Have not had time to get it running on a VPS (the main reason I bought it), but it is worth a shot. Not veteran, but looks very cool. http://radicale.org/
I use radicale on my VPS together with CalDAV-Sync on Android and Thunderbird/Lightning on my desktop. Works really well. Lightweight and simple.
This syncs my calendar. I intend to do contacts the same way with CardDAV-Sync when I get round to it.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#18Remember Kiko?
Were they a startup that was killed the moment Google calendar started?
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#19Loosing contacts can happen. Just this past week my father-in-laws contact info disappeared from Google contacts. This isn't the first time this has happened to me either.
Wtf, I've never had this happen. I would instantly stop using any service where this happened (especially where it's not possible to decently contact support).
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#20Any similar setup that uses IOS phone instead of Android out there? I am tired of contacts going missing from IOS and Google or 4 copies of all my contacts showing up in both IOS and Gmail. I lost all my contacts in IOS when I upgraded to the iPhone 5. Then I had a bunch of contacts that I did not want in my contacts populate my IOS contacts when I linked my Facebook account on my IPhone 5. It is even worse on my Windows 8 notebook as I have 5-6 duplicate contacts for each single contact as it imports from IOS, Outlook, and Gmail.