I did this a few years ago and the blog post (to my suprise) got covered on Ars Technica and others. It always amazes me how people respond with disbelief or wi

I did this a few years ago and the blog post (to my suprise) got covered on Ars Technica and others. It always amazes me how people respond with disbelief or with wonder and awe as if it's some difficult or hard to do thing. At the time there were good, if not better, alternatives for almost everything. The only thing I stuck with was Gmail and Google calendar, but since then I've discovered Fastmail which I think is far better at both (I highly recommend them, they're fairly inexpensive and that means you're not the product, you're the customer). Although for me it was less about privacy (at the time) and more about the fact that I had become dependent on the inter-connections between Google services so when they killed one (ie. Reader) it has a much bigger impact on my personal life than it should have. Now any time a product dies it's easy to move my data over to something else and I never get reliant on interoperability between branded services. I've also got Google Analytics black holed in Firefox, and run an ad blocker of course which (I hope) catches most of their trackers; this just seems good for anyone to do though, even if they're not giving up Google's other services.