Put Not Your Faith In Google

I love Google. Google is like magic. But I don't trust it.

I'm a big proponent of self-sufficiency. I don't trust online services. Now don't get me wrong, I use online services all the time. But I don't rely on them exclusively. I use Gmail for email, but I maintain my own domain name and email address that forwards to Gmail. That way, if something happened to Gmail or they annoyed me excessively, I could take my email elsewhere. I've had many, many email providers over the years, but I still have the same email address. I keep all my email on my own computer, instead of relying on the Google copies. If the Internet went down, I'd still have my email and contacts.

I hate media with DRM. All my music is in MP3 format. I've seen too many times that people with DRM-locked assets lose them when the DRM owner discontinued their servers.

I use Google calendar. But I sync it with Sunbird. That's a new trick I learned today. I use a Sunbird extension called Provider for Google Calendar to synchronize Sunbird with Google calendar. Then I use Google Sync to sync between Google calendar and my Blackberry. Now all my computers, and my phone, and my web calendar are on the same page (or date, if you will).

I use a Thunderbird extension called Google Contacts to sync my contacts between Gmail and Thunderbird, and the same Google Sync mentioned above to sync contacts with my Blackberry.

I use web services, "the cloud", but I have everything replicated and synchronized locally so I have copies if I'm off the net. I use the net to keep everything in sync.

So... are you asleep yet?


Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: Links
Comments