That post is devoid of insight and full of inaccuracies such that it could easily be mistaken for shameless attention seeking or just astroturf.
My divorce from Google - One year later
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Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#12It's hard for me to take "Google divorce" seriously from someone who still uses Facebook.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#13My additional recommendations:
Gmail -> business hushmail
Google Maps -> Bing Maps
GPS -> Use an actual GPS device or one of the iOS/Android maps that download to your phone.
GChat -> This one is tricky due to being subject to network effects. Without getting into hyper nerdy jabber or private IRC nonsense, I'd say just use OTR and be done with it if the point is privacy.
Google+ -> meet people for lunch
Docs -> Zoho/Microsoft Office/Open Office.org/LibreOffice
Google Drive -> Dropbox, add encryption if you want. There are libre alternatives if you want to set up your own fileserver with automagic sync. I'm trying not to get too far out into left-field on this list.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#14I've been pleasantly surprised with Fastmail.fm's new webmail interface, and am currently in the process of switching away from Google. The one thing I can't seem to find is a good replacement for Google Contacts or Google Calendar. I'm currently set up with an account at fruux.com, which does hosted carddav + caldav, but finding good clients for Linux has been more challenging than I expected.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#15Interesting how he did not list any Bing services as possible substitutes even for things like images, email and translation.
I am not sure, but I think babelfish uses bing translation.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#16So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies? I trust google with my data more than I trust Facebook or LinkedIn or Microsoft.
Google runs their own ad network (and it's generally an honest and upstanding ad network, unlike some others). All that data they collect on you is for their own internal consumption. If they ever sell their data, they are giving their competitive advantage to their competitors - not going to happen. Other companies are also logging and collecting every scrap of data that they can, but they aren't consumers of that data. It just gets sold to the highest bidder. I'd much rather have google tracking me and know where that data is going, than have somebody else tracking me and never knowing where that data is going to end up.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#17For moving away from Gmail, I'd be interested in solutions that help you data-mine ahead of time how many mailing lists/services/etc you have linked to your address.
It might be easy to just "switch" one day away from Gmail, but it could easily be weeks and months of manually unsubscribing/notifying/etc providers of the new address to use.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#18Maybe he can stop using computers and go back to stone age.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#19My additional recommendations: Gmail -> business hushmail Google Maps -> Bing Maps GPS -> Use an actual GPS device or one of the iOS/Android maps that download to your phone. GChat -> This one is tricky due to being subject to network effects. Without getting into hyper nerdy jabber or private IRC nonsense, I'd say just use OTR and be done with it if the point is privacy. Google+ -> meet people for lunch Docs -> Zoho…
From the perspective of privacy, Microsoft/Bing anything isn't a meaningful alternative to Google. They have almost the same privacy policy and were far less transparent about adopting it.
See: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-privacy-change-google-att...
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#20Given his reference to downloading apps from the Play store and Amazon store... it sure sounds like he's still using an Android device.