New Data: Google+ Public Posts Decrease by 41% Over Past Two Months

The core advantage of Google+, as marketed by Google, is to allow you to separate different parts of your life and keep privacy between them. You can keep in contact with people from work, from your private life, whatever -- and keep them all separate. This deals with the primary perceived flaw in Facebook: hardly any users cared about what Facebook knew about them, but they were very worried about what other people knew about them.

But often "keeping them separate" means not giving your real name. Artists using pseudonyms is the most common example, but there's many others: every day, millions of people take part in communities that they would not want to say at work that they were part of. Sometimes it's related to sexual fetishes/kink, unusual hobbies, fandom, or even things like sexual orientation.

Even with "circles", if the people in group B know you by the same name as the people in group A (say, work), you have no privacy at all. All it takes is one person from Group B to look up your real name and contact someone, and the separation is completely broken.

The idea of Google+ was to solve this problem: whether it's to avoid telling their coworkers about that drunken party last night, to maintain the personal privacy of a popular artist, or to avoid telling a bigoted boss that they're homosexual. This is what Google+ was supposed to do. But if people are required to use real names, Google+ doesn't actually solve this problem at all. It's just Facebook by a different name.

circles are nice but limited.

events? where on earth are events? google calendar integration?

is it a social network or a work network? what's the point of g+?

the content of g+ is sparse compared to fb: e.g., friend of friend actions are private on g+, but visible on fb.

I've been compiling a list of places that I could move to and use my own domain.

So far I had:

lavabit.com fastmail.fm zoho.com domains.live.com

Might give them all a go and report back in a Jekyll created blog post on S3 :-)

How I divested from Google services. Others please reply with their own tales.

The first thing to realize is that, like most projects, you don't have to go from zero to 100% accomplishment in one step. Perfection never ships. My approach was to use the solutions that would get me off Google as quickly as possible, and then gradually search for better solutions. But you know what? None of these things are really that critical.

The second thing to realize is that Google services are really good, and in some cases you'll have to settle for something that's more than good enough, but not quite as good as Google. Risk vs reward, as always.

Gmail -> fastmail.fm and Thunderbird as my client (but they have webmail too). They've been around awhile and they have good credibility. I use their lowest paid plan, $5/year, so I've set up Thunderbird to download messages immediately, so as not to bust my storage limit. Their highest plan is $40/year and 10G storage; cheap and more than good enough. Their spam protection is OK, not as good as gmail's. In fact I had a minor episode of false positives, but it cleared up in a day.

Fastmail, if you're listening, I would pursue excellent spam protection (better than your current good enough performance) as an opportunity to win gmail (and probably yahoo) expats. The rest of your service is very, very good.

I have my own domain, and I just point my domain to fastmail now instead of gmail. Regardless of who provides your mail storage and transfer, I highly recommend having your own domain, it's cheap. Don't rent your identity from anyone. G+ may try to tell us that your real name is your most important piece of identity, but on the net your email address(es) is much more fundamental.

Reader -> Thunderbird. No, it's not in the cloud, but this was the fastest way to move. It's not my final step, and I'm slowly looking at other cloud solutions. I could conceivably stay with Tbird though. It's not a great solution, it was just the quickest to implement. It's rather clunky to add a feed, but reading is fine, and you can save posts just like email messages, in the same folders as your messages. That's kind of cool.

Firefox has something called Live Bookmarks IIRC, for feeds. I used it awhile back and I recall it worked pretty good, certainly better than Thunderbird.

Calendar -> Thunderbird. A little better than RSS above, but it's still not cloudy, and I haven't bothered trying to sync it with anything, although I think you can. Again, this was just the quickest way to get off Google in one swift move. I would like to find a cloudy/better solution.

Address book -> Thunderbird again. Fastmail has an addressbook, I think you get 400 contacts at my $5/year level. I haven't bothered yet. Besides, I'm using Tbird as my mail interface anyway.

Docs -> Libre Office, restructured text, my machine, DropBox and email. If you need realtime collaboration, that's going to be difficult. If you're on G+, Skud (+K Robert IIRC) has a thread on her efforts to move, and the alternatives are a couple (one?) good but cost-ish solutions; she opted to stay with Docs for now, because she collaborates with non-tech volunteers.

Picasa -> pick one. I've never been very social with pictures, email has always served me more than well enough.

If you think about it, email really is the uber-network. We should be building social networks on top of email; it's not captive, it's built on RFCs and it fucking works. I've always thought you could do a lot with imap folders.

Fastmail/Opera, there's an opportunity for you to be "the kid from nowhere ... Cinderella story." Not that you'd own the network, but you could really gain users if you led the way into social email.

Blog -> pick one. Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress, roll your own. I've had Blogger and Posterous, I'd probably go back to Posterous in the near term and eventually roll my own. Tumblr and Posterous are more than good enough. While I was still using G+ I read a few positive experiences from non-tech people migrating from Blogger to Wordpress.

Search -> DuckDuckGo. They're awesome. Their tools are numerous and literally at your fingertips. They don't track you. Their results pages are uncluttered. And if you don't see what you like, they have a link to Google search right there on the results page. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Being tracked by Google -> stay logged out of all Google services. Moving all your services out is obviously essential. Once you're no longer logging in, you aren't cookied and tracked, except for your IP when you visit a site that uses Analytics, but you can't do much about that anyway unless you want to use noscript(?).

Happy Independence Day.