I'm getting really nervous about relying so much on Google. I'll be working on transitioning off of them from here on out for all my projects and recommendations. I just learned about the Leaflet map library for example.
I recently caught myself thinking: "How much would someone have to pay me to never use another Google product?" While contemplating my use of gMail, Search, Calendar, YouTube, etc., I wrapped my head around how powerful and irreplaceable Google and its products are to me. Now that they're winding down Reader, I'm reminded at how vulnerable we all are given this reliance.
I've actually been putting numbers on this: there are many fans of NewsBlur, apparently, as a replacement for Google Reader, so that's $12 a year; I'm worried about being tied to my Gmail address, so I finally got around to setting up a vanity domain address which forwards to Gmail and that's going to be about $10 a year. So I'm up to $22 a year, and I haven't looked into any free or paid replacements for Google Calendar or Analytics...
Between Google retiring stuff and Twitter's ongoing war against client developers, I'm seriously considering just packing up and self-hosting everything I care about on my VPS.
I've been thinking along the same lines. To begin I'd like to just mirror everything on a VPS (email, rss, calendars, dropbox, music library, youtube playlists, bookmarks (for me: pinboard)) on the VPS.
Then I'd have cobble together whatever oss webapps I need to access all that remotely, and then lock the whole thing down -- ideally only allow external access via ssh and then set up my phone/laptop to VPN through it when I want access.
It would be at least a day of work to set it all up but I think I've almost reached the requisite pain point.
EDIT: and it would be nice if I could run phone numbers through it as well via something like http://voip.ms/ ... if anyone is aware of someone doing something like this and writing it up I'd be interested to know, I haven't come across any setup like this.
pobox.com (http://pobox.com/pricing) is a fairly stable domain for email with lifetime hosting for as low as $20/yr (forwarding only) or $50/yr (hosting)
I think NearlyFreeSpeech.net is probably about as stable a forwarding host, and cheaper. (I host my http://www.gwern.net on Amazon S3/Cloudflare at ~$4/month or $48, so pobox.com wouldn't be cheaper in toto unless you meant web hosting rather than email.)
Well, that depends. I had the same reaction, and my thought was to basically go the opensource route, but some products almost have to be replaced with a company. Products I use from Google:
* Search - replace with duck duck go
* Chrome - Firefox, most likely, but there are tons of browser options these days.
* Voice - this is the one that really has me hooked into the service. Not sure what I'd use instead, if not just a regular phone number.
* reader - now built into owncloud, dozens of reader replacements popping up.
* youtube - probably won't replace. I usually don't log in any way. Uploads that I do occasionally post will go to vimeo.
* gmail - aside from the hassle of switching, rolling an email server isn't too hard. downtime is a concern, but I could mitigate this by hosting it in the cloud somewhere, or even doing a colo backup at a friend's house. Paying for email is an option, I suppose, which could have benefits.
Other than that, I'm not sure. These moves by Google recently just seem skeevy to me. I think it started with the G+ stuff, but since then my trust in Google is waning, so this is a thing I think about somewhat regularly now.
See the real thing Google has is not that they offer a bunch of services, it's that those services are all tied together very neatly.
When I transition to a new computer all I have to do is install chrome and I basically have everything I need - the login will get me all my extensions + put me in email, calander, voice, youtube, and search. All with one login, that's the power, people are lazy, they don't really care about OSS or freedom, they follow the path of least resistance, and in this case that's Google, good or evil.
It sucks but it's true. I keep thinking about moving to a different email provider but then I have to find one that does all the things that gmail does, and has a decent calender app (there is NO replacement for voice) and something that does search in an okay and understandable way. I can't find one. The only reason I use facebook over G+ is because I don't know anyone on G+ otherwise that too wold be my social network of choice. In addition my University uses Gapps so I'd be stuck with google regardless (for at least the next four years).
And really that's the issue, so far it seems from history that once you reach a certain critical mass, there is no way to not be evil, Google was great until about 2011, but they've turned on us....
wow...just realized this is a lot of rambling... still I make a couple good points
This is kinda the rough spot for me too. Google services are just so damned convenient. Especially with the integration. I noticed the same thing you have. Computer dies? No big, fix it and sign into Chrome. I'm 90% there.
However, with Reader, it's kinda served as a warning to me. I use this stuff every day. Reader was just kinda the reminder that I don't own any of this stuff, and they can turn it off at any time. 2 years ago, I had basically zero fear of something like that. Today, especially with CalDAV support getting killed, it's just another warning to me that Google is a different company than it was.
Anyway, I'm typing this on Chrome in between reading Gmail and Google Voice messages and stuff, but I'm definitely looking for alternatives. Too much of my life relies on Google. Don't want all my eggs in one basket.
Interesting list. This got me wondering if there are any zero-knowledge email providers out there, especially ones that let you use your own domain. Only thing I found so far though is an empty Quora question:
For that particular need, I'd expect that I'm rolling my own, or using a service provided by my business or something. At the very least, I'd assume that I'm paying for it, and even then, when you get to that level, you probably want to just do it yourself for the knowledge that you really do have complete control.
Yup, I'd expect to pay for such a thing, no problem with that, just don't see any even for pay. Rolling my own is the other alternative, will probably end up doing that.
