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Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

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Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#251

Post by PavlovsCat »

rogerchucker wrote: post #208
pyre wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people are OK with something until it bites them. Plenty of people are 'ok' with not backing up their information (e.g. family photos), until a storage failure takes it all away.

Yes it's called taking risk. I am aware of it - people like you seem to get offended that we actually take that risk in exchange of the convenience (free and more or less stable services).

If you pay for it with information, it is no more "free" than if you payed for it with money.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#252

Post by bad_user »

rogerchucker wrote: post #160
Steko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo ... Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now." I must have missed something, did Google acquire Dropbox? Dropbox makes their money from the Dropbox product which is exactly why you should use a company like them instead of a borg offering. I prefer Sugarsync but there are no shortage of options.

I prefer these services free and have no problem being tracked for more personalized ads. I don't wanna pay with my wallet - I am OK with paying with my information.

By principle I prefer software that's free as in freedom of speech and services that are managed by non-profits.

However, you're not talking about "free as in freedom of speech", but rather about being a cheap bastard.

Nothing wrong with that, I am and will always be a cheap bastard myself. BUT sometimes being cheap is different from being frugal and can have a negative effect on your bottom line.

My Dropbox subscription costs as much as 2 Starbucks coffees and man, let me tell you, I drink a lot of coffee. In exchange I get a good Linux client, a good iPad client, plus unlimited history of changes. I also trust them with my data, for now at least.

With Google Drive you may think that you'll always have alternatives to move in case they shut it down. However, by supporting Google, you're contributing to a possible future where no alternatives are left. Also, in case Google ever cuts you out of your account based on a malfunctioning script that calculated some probability that you may be violating their TOS for one of their dozens of services, you will not have the moral right to bitch about it, because you knew the associated risks.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#253

Post by claudius »

aniket_ray wrote: post #213
gwern wrote: post #210

> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really. If this is true, it makes fools out of everyone on HN who defended Google and poo-pooed the reaction to the XMPP spam move as being merely geek hyst…

Umm ... XMPP is not being dropped only support for XMPP federation.

And what’s the point of XMPP if you drop federation?

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#254

Post by aw3c2 »

micloud wrote: post #197
JoshTriplett wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now. Owncloud is buggy, Sparkleshare seems like a "when you've got a hammer, everything's a nail" kind of solution, and I haven't tried Seafile yet because the configuration is intimidating and I haven't really heard anything about it. git-annex-assistant provides a friendly Dropbox replacement, with a web-based GUI and a magically synced/shared folder. Supports Linux,…

Replacing dropbox is an easy task. Have u tried tonido ( http://www.tonido.com )

That is neither self-hosted nor free open-source from a quick look at it.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#255

Post by aw3c2 »

bad_user wrote: post #252
rogerchucker wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer these services free and have no problem being tracked for more personalized ads. I don't wanna pay with my wallet - I am OK with paying with my information.

By principle I prefer software that's free as in freedom of speech and services that are managed by non-profits. However, you're not talking about "free as in freedom of speech", but rather about being a cheap bastard. Nothing wrong with that, I am and will always be a cheap bastard myself. BUT sometimes being cheap is different from being frugal and can have a negative effect on your bottom line. My Dropbox subscrip…

Using free software to host services yourself is hardly being a cheap bastard. You are paying for the hosting part yourself.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#256

Post by aw3c2 »

PaulFreund wrote: post #239

I left Google in favour of self hosted applications: * Horde Webmail (http://www.horde.org/) which brings * Webmail, * Calendar, * Addressbook * Tasks * Notes * Sync via Exchange ActiveSync or SyncML (most mobiles incl. iOS and Android support it) * XMPP server (http://prosody.im/) * Multi IM transports (http://spectrum.im) * XMPP webclient, Jappix (http://jappix.org/) * Owncloud for files (http://owncloud.org/) * Se…

Jappix looks really nice. Is there a lightweight Android client that polls every few minutes for new messages? I would need to be notified about new messages when the phone is inactive (screen off). A browser is too big for that.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#257

Post by siddboots »

vertis wrote: post #13

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat. I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

> I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

I've been using Feedly since the Google Reader announcement, and am quite happy with it.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#258

Post by bad_user »

aw3c2 wrote: post #255
bad_user wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By principle I prefer software that's free as in freedom of speech and services that are managed by non-profits. However, you're not talking about "free as in freedom of speech", but rather about being a cheap bastard. Nothing wrong with that, I am and will always be a cheap bastard myself. BUT sometimes being cheap is different from being frugal and can have a negative effect on your bottom line. My Dropbox subscrip…

Using free software to host services yourself is hardly being a cheap bastard. You are paying for the hosting part yourself.

The comment I replied to does NOT mention hosting free software by yourself, a route with which I agree if you're so inclined.

The comment I replied to mentions preference towards Ads-enabled services, just because they are free of charge and when a subscription to a service that keeps your data is the same price as 2 coffees, that's being a cheap bastard dude.

Also, in case this term offends anyone, it wasn't really meant to be insulting. As I said, I'm a cheap bastard myself. For instance I take advantage of a lot of available freebies, like Heroku's free dynos. I'm also a free Google Apps user and haven't made any attempts to escape Google's silo. Nothing wrong with that. But in regards to the price you end up paying, sometimes cheap stuff ends up costing more.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#259

Post by LaGrange »

rogerchucker wrote: post #160
Steko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo ... Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now." I must have missed something, did Google acquire Dropbox? Dropbox makes their money from the Dropbox product which is exactly why you should use a company like them instead of a borg offering. I prefer Sugarsync but there are no shortage of options.

I prefer these services free and have no problem being tracked for more personalized ads. I don't wanna pay with my wallet - I am OK with paying with my information.

For me, and a few other people, 'personalized ads' is something that sounds very, very bad in itself, even if separated from the privacy issues. There really is a point on the scale of ad effectiveness where it stops being useful information and becomes brainwashing.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#260

Post by bad_user »

thezilch wrote: post #20

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…

> Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome.

That's pretty harsh. Firefox has always been for me the most awesome browser available.

It's true that Chrome delivered some niceties for user experience and performance, forcing Firefox to follow suit in some areas.

However, Chrome stands on the shoulders of giants, like Firefox and it wouldn't be a good browser without such shoulders. Google should be really thankful to Firefox and I'm sure they are.

Also, Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds lately and after several months of Chrome, I realized that I cannot live without Firefox.

(yes, I'm typing this from Firefox)

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