13 ms·

Expunging Google

289 points by duncan_bayne 14y ago

zalew 14y ago
> Bing Maps looks like a potential alternative why not openstreetmaps?
- joahua 14y ago
  It's pretty incomplete for parts of the world, and certain applications require accuracy (or at least completeness). The answer, of course, is to contribute, but when your core business isn't mapping that's hard to propose as a viable fix. Parts of the world in my case ~= Sydney, which has a decent number of geeks per capita to contribute. OSM is wonderful, but has a way to go before it's a viable solution for everyone.
  - incanus77 14y ago
    Check out MapBox and http://ideditor.com http://ideditor.com.
    - joahua 14y ago
      iDeditor is great! Leagues ahead of other OSM interfaces I've seen :) Did MapBox have anything to do with it? Polished! Love the walkthrough! I've just recently discovered (and love) TileMill.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Second that. Google maps are surprisingly bad in a number of first-world countries like France or Israel; OpenStreetMap are very very detailed. I don't think Bing maps would be better than either of those.
stonith 14y ago
Adding the missing features (email + maps) to owncloud would appear to be the neatest way to go. Then target something like the openstack API and you can move between providers pretty easily. The bit that bugs me is how to deal with rolling your own maps provider, but if you're willing to compromise on having access to all maps all the time it wouldn't be so hard.
kylec 14y ago
One alternative to Google Groups is 37signals' Breeze: http://basecamp.com/breeze http://basecamp.com/breeze $20 one-time payment to create a group email list.
g3rald 14y ago
For companies like Google we are mere merchandise, as we do not generate sufficient profits they discard us, well done ...
cromwellian 14y ago
"It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web" That's a pretty bold claim and an epic overreaction, especially given that Google currently derives 97% of its revenue from the Web, and if it goes away, it would be very problematic for Google.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  The Web is a small subset of the Internet. There are many other protocols to enable the sharing of data between individuals and platforms, and it looks like Google wishes to deprecate at least some of those in favour of its own end-to-end solution. I think that killing off Reader in favour of G+ is the start of acceleration in that direction. I hope I'm wrong.
  - cromwellian 14y ago
    First of all, the quote, from you, specifically says "open Web" not "open Internet" Secondly, Reader was not killed because of G+. If FriendFeed is finally killed off, will you say it was because Facebook needed the resources and engineers on a competing product? Consumers have moved on to desire the kinds of features that are inherent in services like Facebook, and RSS simply isn't suited to solving the problem of federated social networking. There is no open standard for this, remember, Google tried it with PubHubSubHub/WebFinger/OpenID/OAuth/ActivityStreams but it didn't work. I favor federated feeds as well (see my essay http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...), but honestly, for me personally, RSS was a HUGE step back from what I had on USENET in the 80s with RN/TRN. Someone must create a new, open federated social networking platform, but honestly, you can't put the cart before the horse. Google tried that several times and failed. First, you've got to built a super successful platform consumers love, then you can standardize it. The history of doing it the other way is littered with failure. Remember OpenSocial? I don't think Google has lost sight of the Open Web, I think it just realized that you must focus on the end user design issues first if you want to be successful. Ignore this at your peril, look at the way consumers flock to native apps on mobile. They care about experiences, not implementation. If the "open web" specs don't do the job, then you need to create a product first that consumers show they want, and then work backwards to figure out how to fix the specs.
dools 14y ago
Great list! I had already been eyeballing fastmail but hadn't seen ownCloud. Will check it out, thanks! I agree with you on the Android front, too. Although I'm still struggling to get a new qwerty after my pro+ died :(
- tonylemesmer 14y ago
  Also check out http://aerofs.com/ http://aerofs.com/ (I prefer this to Owncloud)
ok_craig 14y ago
I still think this is all ridiculous. Stopping support for a product that uses a certain standard doesn't mean you're against that standard, unless you're a conspiracy theorist. You can argue that they're against certain open standards if you want, but the canceling of Reader isn't actually evidence of that. Simultaneously putting effort into G+ is also not evidence of that. It's not even symbolic of that. It is only evidence of shifting product priorities, not outright opposition to open standards. The singular data point that I can think of as being anti-standard is the pending drop of CalDAV for Calendar, which I personally think sucks. But nobody ever cites that. Everybody's pissed that Google canceled a product that they liked, and that's what's driving this never-ending criticism.
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  The main problem with Google at the moment is the centralization of many popular services into one corporate entity. Video, search, email etc. are all now in the hands of, mostly, Google. With so few viable competitors, you get a de-factory monopoly as well as insane growth. The centralization itself is the problem. Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass and autonomous cars, Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated, and Google does not seem to care much about Internet standards or about being ethical.
  - numbchuckskills 14y ago
    "Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated " - you're joking right?
  - ok_craig 14y ago
    I can get behind your first paragraph, which is basically just saying that as a consumer you like to support variety and a dynamic market by using services from multiple providers. If that's you're goal, that's a reasonable enough justification for me. However, that's not a reaction that would come as a direct result of one product cancellation (because it is a proactive, not reactive perspective), and my comment is in response to the post, which explicitly claims the reason for expunging Google is due to Google's supposed new opposition to open standards. I really don't understand your angle with the second paragraph though. It's just the kind of stuff that's going to make this all devolve into a battle of words about who the best/worst/most evil/most creative/most underdog/most overvalued/undervalued/deserving/undeserving companies are. Frankly a generalization like that without any specifics or context is a fanboy thing to say. If you're trying to tell me that Google is a stagnating company doing more net harm than good, all I think it's worth to say is that I think you're terribly wrong, and I disagree.
richardjordan 14y ago
Most important thing is to not get so entrenched in one technology vendor or another. They are not part of you. You're not an Apple person or a Google person - that's just how companies want you to think. Don't let technology choices become part of who you think you are. Use tech that helps you until it doesn't. Always have an exit plan. Don't get emotionally attached to one company or emotionally put off another. They're corporations. The don't care about you. Thy offer a service. If that service comes as part of a trade you're comfortable with use it, else don't.
- mrich 14y ago
  This is the comment that should be at the top of this thread.
parennoob 14y ago
I don't think Google is 'actively working against an open web', but the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+ makes me reconsider every time they open up a new service (didn't even glance at Keep, for example. Remember what happened to Google Notebook?) It's nice to have open source alternatives, and possibly to help them grow. If a lot more people start using, say, ownCloud, it will probably help develop it into a more robust and usable platform. Also, as a hacker, having a stack of my own software side-by-side with my current Google/Apple stack will probably help me learn more as I use it more, and will give me something to fall back on in case Google shutters it.
- cromwellian 14y ago
  "the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+" There's a lot of erroneous assumptions in there. Reader was never really a product with much support, it was more a labor of love of a small dedicated team. Reader was not shutdown to "make way for G+" anymore than any of the other spring cleaned services were shut down because of competing services. Even the original (ex-Googler now) Reader engineers have pretty much outlined many of the reasons, including the decline of RSS, which was killed off in large part by people moving to services like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. It's really regretable, but it's time to realize that the rest of the world moved on, and if we want federated, open services, it's going to have to built from the ground up, and in a way that users, not hackers, will want to use it.
logn 14y ago
I don't know about replacing Google with DDG. I'd prefer an engine that actually does its own indexing. Yandex is the only alternative that fits the bill in my mind: http://www.yandex.com http://www.yandex.com Also, so happy to learn about ownCloud. As a developer, I'm a little disappointed to see AGPL licensing, but it's probably a smart choice and I use that license in some projects.
- dublinben 14y ago
  DDG actually pulls its results from Yandex and several other sources. Why limit yourself to a single, old-fashioned crawler, when you can use one of the most innovative meta-search engines? http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399 http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399
  - logn 14y ago
    Meta-search is a pretty old idea too. And you're at the mercy of your sources and have less insight into the data you're searching and less ability to rank pages.
lessnonymous 14y ago
FYI: Fastmail, while still developed in Australia, is now owned by Opera Software.
- 3825 14y ago
  I'd like to give credit to Google where it is due. With takeout, it is very easy to get quite a bit of your information. You already could get your emails by IMAP or POP but still Google set a standard with Takeout :) This makes it possible for someone to just pack his bags and leave. This is also the reason why I am staying.
yanw 14y ago
I try to avoid these sorts of submissions, mainly because of their non-content and the subsequent familiar discussion, but somehow they keep reaching the front page. It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”. Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”: http://www.webrtc.org http://www.webrtc.org http://www.chromium.org http://www.chromium.org And their various web speed efforts: https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed And of course: https://fiber.google.com https://fiber.google.com I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader. Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  Thanks - I've corrected that error. See my other comments on this item for rebuttal of your other points :)
- kyrias 14y ago
  Huh, Firefox hasn't dropped RSS support? The button is just not in the Awesomebar anymore.
- josteink 14y ago
  Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”: http://www.chromium.org That's funny. I see Chromium as their OSS alibi for doing whatever non-standard they want with open-web HTML, which doesn't exist in any other browser. But now it's not "proprietary", because it's in a OS code-repo somewhere. So now it's "standards" even though it hasn't been submitted, ratified or approved yet. And everyone else, if they dont want Google's stuff to work poorly in their browser, has to be a dog and follow Google's leash. I consider Chromium some of the worst damage Google has done to the open web.
nfoz 14y ago
Stop whining and build something better. Reader was never a very good RSS reader anyway. You can do better.
- adamors 14y ago
  Reader was a great RSS archiver and syncer though.
ternaryoperator 14y ago
owncloud was an interesting item on his replacement list. Has anyone else used owncloud and can vouch for it? If so, are you self-hosting it or using a commercial host? If the latter, which one?
- xradionut 14y ago
  I was mildly interested in it until I saw the letters PHP, then lost interest.
ternaryoperator 14y ago
owncloud was an interesting item on his replacement list. Has anyone else used owncloud and can vouch for it? If so, are you self-hosting it or using a commercial host? If the latter, which one?
rentzsch 14y ago
I've barely used it, but http://librelist.com http://librelist.com seems like a potential Google Groups replacement.
niggler 14y ago
I've asked multiple times about adding subdomains to distinguish repos from blogs, but it appears that this is a workaround that no subdomain reporting would detect
xwei 14y ago
I use all the products you listed. And I will not attack a company just because of a product. If you just want to be popular? you did it. Kid.
zobzu 14y ago
For maps you may want to try here.com It's not bad - faster than gmaps too
- olalonde 14y ago
  Hmmm Laval shows up before Montreal... I think I'll keep using Google Maps for now.
  - ernesth 14y ago
    Google Maps has its share of little cities showing before big ones. I currently see a Digoin on the map of France whereas Saint-Étienne, Clermont-Ferrand, Bourges (or Laval) do not appear...
lettergram 14y ago
I have seen many of these posts recently and I honestly do not understand. I use Google products and it definitely beats out most of the competition and doesn't interfere with anything worse than any other product out there. Sure the internet is changing, and you can either go with it (or not). Switching to many different products to complete the same tasks (many of them worse than Google products) seems kind of silly to me.
felipelalli 14y ago
exagerado.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  Nah, farsighted :) Seriously, you just wait. If you're a user on a commercial system you didn't pay for (Google, Facebook, etc.) then you're not a customer, you're cattle. Your value is directly proportional to how much the company running the system knows about you. I don't like where Facebook is going, and I think Google is following in their footsteps, albeit helped along by an excellent reputation for quality and fair play, especially amongst geeks. Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons.
  - jmesserly 14y ago
    > Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons. I see this meme a lot, but I don't get it how the analogy is supposed to work. There is actual evidence that Microsoft in the 90's was trying to sabotage standard protocols and open source software, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents. The key part of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy was extending the standard in proprietary ways, thus making it incompatible and no longer implementable via open source software, thus killing it. I don't get how any of this applies to any web company, where nearly the entire business is based on the web and the standards that back it. It's no wonder that many of these companies contribute back to the web standards and open source software. Sure, these contributions are in the company's interests--but that's the whole point. We reached a time when it's in interests of many big (and small) corporations to contribute to open source and standards (including Microsoft!). Some people see efforts to improve standards or contribute new ones as somehow bad, "embrace and extend". When actually it's the opposite: investing in the commons to promote its welfare. Obligatory disclaimer: speaking for myself here, not any employer past or present.
    - 14y ago
ebbv 14y ago
This is not conscious consumerism. This is a childish temper tantrum. Chrome has better developer tools. If your job is being a web dev and you purposely make your job harder because you're mad at Google for shutting down Reader, you're not being rational.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  I'll still happily use Chromium for web development, as and where necessary. Just not signed in to Google for sync, etc. etc. I do wonder though ... would you have described the formation of the FSF as a childish temper tantrum? I remember the days when to use Linux as a development OS was painful ... it worked out well in the end though :)
  - magicalist 14y ago
    I don't entirely agree with the GP's phrasing, but it's worth pointing out that the FSF doesn't paint all a company's software with the same brush. They're happy to rail against non-free software while accepting contributions to GNU projects from the same developers.
  - jxi 14y ago
    FSF is an ideal. The ideal that all software is open source so that it's more secure and has all the other benefits of open source. What you're doing is being childish. "Boo hoo, big bad Google killed a product I liked, so I'm going to make some bullshit arguments to stop using ALL their products." I don't use all of Google's products, but I use a subset because they get the job done well. If you think killing off reader was a bad idea, why not build your own and see how the cost/benefit ratio pays off. What problem are you even solving by doing this? You're just throwing a childish fit.
    - duncan_bayne 14y ago
      I don't think it was a bad idea, I think it was a very good idea from their perspective. I think that what they're trying to do is a bad idea for everyone, which is why I've changed platform. Why do you assume I'm angry about it?
ahoge 14y ago
RSS just isn't very popular. Firefox also removed that RSS icon from the address bar a few months ago. Do you think Mozilla did that because they "oppose the open web"? No, of course they don't. They got rid of it because virtually no one used it.
alexeston 14y ago
Just like everybody else said, Google is not moving against the open web. Rather the opposite. The only thing I agree with is the part where Google tries to get everybody to use Google only, which makes sense considering Google can be compared to a small empire. I mean, has anyone seen the office buildings that Google has? As for Chrome, I think Webkit (or now Blink) is where web happens fastest. All new web experiments are done with -webkit, not -moz-, and you gotta go where the majority goes. In this case anyway. I haven't used gmail for a long time tho', because I didn't like that the content of my emails get used for ads - so I set up my own email server for personal usage. Other then that, maps, search .. it does what I need it to do so whether it tracks me or whatever is just the cost of the service.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- woe 14y ago
  > and you gotta go where the majority goes ... which is why we all still use Internet Explorer.
- bzbarsky 14y ago
  > All new web experiments are done with -webkit, not -moz- Uh... That happens to not be true. But WebKit does have much better (and better-funded) marketing.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
cageface 14y ago
I understand why people are reluctant to trust a single corporation with so much control over their personal information, particularly when, as they say, the user is as much the product as the customer. I'm generally a big defender of Google but even I am disquieted by their maneuvering around Google+. However, I also doubt it's possible to build services as sophisticated as GMail on direct payments from users. I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to pay what it would cost to build and run a service like GMail without ads.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  > I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to > pay what it would cost to build and run a service like > GMail without ads. What do you think the problem would be? I'm using Fastmail now, and not missing anything from Gmail. All for $50 / month.
  - cageface 14y ago
    I tried Fastmail last year and maybe my impressions are out of date but it can't compete on features at all. The web interface is stone age compared to gmail, search is far slower and less sophisticated, spam filtering was not as good etc. No native apps are available for mobile. Fastmail isn't bad but I don't consider them to be in the same league.
    - gcb0 14y ago
      Zimbra was a good alternative, but yahoo bought it and crapped it out
    - alexmuller 14y ago
      The new Fastmail webmail interface is actually massively on-par with Gmail. It's very slick and I'd encourage everyone to give it a(nother) go.
    - woe 14y ago
      FastMail is a fantastic IMAP email service and a very good webmail service, but it's a very poor mobile email service - for access from smartphones and tablets (including contacts and calendar syncing) it falls woefully short.
czk 14y ago
Streeme is a good alternative to Google Music https://code.google.com/p/streeme/ https://code.google.com/p/streeme/
tikhonj 14y ago
Even assuming Google is not being malicious--and I think that's a broadly safe assumption--I'm still concerned. I'm am significantly over-reliant on Google's serviced: my email, my calendar, my OpenID, my web search, my videos, my phone, my maps, my web browser... (Well, I do use Firefox now.) It's a single point of failure. A rather scary one at that. Some of these things do not have good alternatives. My phone? I could use an iPhone or Windows phone, but Apple and Microsoft are malicious. Also, they both hate Linux. But the other things? I probably could--and probably should--move some of them to a different service, if only in the interest of diversification. Of course, I've been meaning to do this for a while. But I haven't. In many different, usually small ways, I'm hooked into Google. That by itself worries me; in some cases, even if I did want to move to a different service, it would not be easy. Very importantly, this is not Google's fault at all--in fact, they're very good about making my data portable. It's entirely poor planning on my part. Yet it's still an issue. Perhaps the worst part--or the best part--is that I don't have any immediate problems with this situation. Everything works. Quite well. I just have a general sense of disquiet about it all. Just something to think about.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  Disquet. That's _exactly_ it, and I wish I'd thought to use that word in the first place. You're right that Google is still better than Apple and Microsoft. I'm still hoping that Ubuntu for phones gets some traction, I'd love for a truly general-purpose pocket computer.
  - zjmichen 14y ago
    If Canonical doesn't turn evil too. Some of their actions give me pause. Oh but man I want Ubuntu phone to be good.
    - duncan_bayne 14y ago
      Ditto ... it could be so awesome. I can do most of my dev work on a low-spec ARM box, given a decent keyboard and display. Bluetooth keyboard, some sort of projector ... I'm excited.
h2s 14y ago
I'm planning to do exactly this, myself. Not so much because of any perceived danger to the open web posed by Google, but because I've come to realise that I simply have too many eggs in their basket. Tellingly, my list of products that I will be replacing is almost completely different to this person's. Google has become the Walmart of computing and it's time to resist.
jay_kyburz 14y ago
I would find this a lot harder. I have 6 applications running on Google App Engine. I use Analytics to track stats in them. I use Ad Sense and Ad words to help monetise them. I have 2 apps for business accounts each with separate gmail, calendar and docs. One for personal life one for business. Crome is significantly better than both Safari and Firefox on my Mac laptop event though I use both and have all three browsers open, each has a different google account loged into it.
Kiro 14y ago
I'm doing the opposite.
tbirdz 14y ago
I might recommend uzing Zoho mail instead of fastmail. I've used it for a while now and it's very nice.
jrockway 14y ago
By these standards, it would seem that every company on Earth is "opposed to an open web" because they don't make available a free web-based RSS reader.
pavs 14y ago
Also: Self-Host Everything http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/
lnanek2 14y ago
Reminds me of Android Market. Used to be OK for getting apps, but now it is going to shove music and video search results in my face every chance it gets with annoying screens between me and the app search results and annoying continue shopping screens after each app. If I wanted those things, I'd be in the other apps for them, like Google Books or whatever. Of course I'm never in that particular one because Amazon Kindle is so much better. I'm sure if I liked music or video then Google wouldn't be my choice either. I tried to get 300 once for someone and it had a search result for it, but wouldn't show me the page. Then I bought batman instead and it just gave me a license error whenever I tried to watch it. Really would have been better to migrate Android Market/Google Play as soon as someone else made an app store on Android, and there are many, rather than trusting Google not to sell out their users. With Google you invest time in a product, then basically it gets shut down or co-opted into something you don't want. A startup you like getting bought by Google is pretty much the worst thing possible since generally they'll just kill the product. Guess I should go through this list and get off their other services proactively. It just isn't worth trusting Google where you don't have to.
RWeaver 14y ago
People want their news curated, either through hacker news, reddit, Google plus or something else. For a minority RSS was their preference, but for everyone else Google correctly shifted their resources to the future. RIP RSS, you had your day in the sun and lead the way for better products.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  That's a false dichotomy - I can consume curated news through RSS just fine. Trivium is one of my favourite feeds, for example. The only difference between using RSS and following the author on FB/G+/Twitter is that I can use any client I want, and neither of us has to use yet another web service.
dannyr 14y ago
I'm a bit speechless with this post. I have seen overreaction from people when Google shut down Reader. I told myself that the craziest of those overreactions would be for somebody to quit all of Google's services. Then I saw this article and I thought he was trolling. Sadly he is not.
emilis_info 14y ago
Switching to Firefox will not save you. I recently found out that Firefox sends a request to safebrowsing.clients.google.com for every page I visit. I found out how to disable it, but it wasn't straightforward and there were still requests sent to Google for other things. Safe browsing is in Firefox Preferences "Security" tab under "Block reported attack sites" + "Block reported web forgeries". Search for "goog" in about:config to find more interesting things. LiveHTTPHeaders extension is also an eye-opener, because Firebug usually doesn't show these requests.
- magicalist 14y ago
  sniff the connection rather than jumping to conclusions (and especially before telling people to disable a safety feature of their browser). Safe browsing does not send the addresses you visit over the wire. The protocol was very carefully designed to be both fast updating and not expose any information about the sites you visit. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocolv2Spec https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocol... edit: just to save time for others parsing the protocol page, and it's been a while since I've read it, so someone please correct me if I have this wrong, but Firefox (and Chrome, and maybe others, not sure) stores a local set of the first 32 bits of the 256-bit hashes of all the sites currently marked as hosting malware or whatever. Your browser pings fairly often to get an updated version of this set of sites. When you visit a page, the canonicalized name of the page you're on is hashed and the first 32 bits are compared against the database of prefixes. If there is a collision (I believe there are usually a few hundred thousand entries of the 2^32 available hash prefixes), only the first 32 bits of the hash of the page you're on is sent to google, as a request for the set of full hashes of malicious pages that begin with that prefix, which allows for the final, very much local, check. This saves a bunch of time and bandwidth, and lets you get a last minute double check that the page is still bad with no one able to work out what page you're actually on.
chmike 14y ago
When I registered on Quora by using my GoogleId, I was very surprised to see Quora asking me to send an email invite to all my Android phone contacts. Google handed over all the emails of my Android phone contacts to Quora ! Is this what I get from using Android and synchronization ? I didn't see an opt out of that. I'm now waiting for Ubuntu phone, while hoping that they don't try to monetize it using similar abuse of monopole. The Ubuntu desktop spam still hurts. Also, when connecting to my Youtube account, google ask me regularly to use my real name and there is no button to reply just no and don't ever ask me anymore! Google is lowering the barrier for competitors ! Same thing for Twitter and Facebook.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  No, that's what you get when you don't read the permissions you are granting. Here is the permission request I saw: Quora is requesting permission to: View basic information about your account View your email address Manage your contacts Given that, you shouldn't be at all surprised that Quora was able to figure out your phone contacts.
  - chmike 14y ago
    I agree but this means that I can't register in quora with my googleId without giving Quora all my emails. Since I don't use facebook and twitter what options are left ? I do want to use googleId authentication to access Quora but why would that imply I have to give all my emails to Quora ? Why can't I decide about that ? Why is Google imposing that to me ? Is this a commercial deal between Google and Quora ?
    - fpgeek 14y ago
      Google isn't imposing anything, AFAIK. The permissions exist because there are reasonable applications that might want them (e.g. contact sync). Quora is deciding what permissions to ask for. They could ask for more or less (other sites/services do), but they don't.
aray 14y ago
Regardless of where you stand on this issue, this is (to me) why being able to export your data is a first class requirement of a service. For these listed, there's takeout: https://www.google.com/takeout/ https://www.google.com/takeout/ Backing up your online data from services should be just as common (and practiced) as backing up harddrives or important information. You decide which services you want to use, but give yourself the flexibility to move if and when circumstances change.
maxwell2022 14y ago
Good for you...
jpkeisala 14y ago
This is exactly like in nineties and also later some were trying to do anti-microsoft movement.
rmrfrmrf 14y ago
Cool. Now show me how you're going to expunge server-side Google Analytics from your life.
- oelmekki 14y ago
  If you mean replacing analytics for your website, piwik is the answer : http://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/ If you mean not being tracked by analytics, well, it's quite simple : # cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com googleadservices.com edit: formatting
  - rmrfrmrf 14y ago
    I was talking about actual server-side analytics includes. Pretty sure the only way around it is to spoof your user agent data or use a proxy.
jimbosis 14y ago
For replacing Google Groups, you should check out Groupsapces, a UK company. http://groupspaces.com/ http://groupspaces.com/ A free plan gets you two lists of 50 members, and there are many paid options. I've been using it for a group in my local community for over a year now and am very pleased with the product.
laumars 14y ago
Google Talk uses an open protocol, XMPP. So basically any client that support XMPP should (hopefully) work with Google Talk. This means you wouldn't have to migrate your friends / family over to a new client but you can still expunge Google's IM client specifically.
- prg318 14y ago
  Google just recently reinstated federated XMPP for their Google Talk service [1] so you can talk to peers on other XMPP servers. I use an XMPP server that has been provided to me by my e-mail provider (lavabit.com) to chat with my friends/family that use Google Talk without any issues. [1] http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-April/001672.html http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-April/001672...
overshard 14y ago
I love these articles and seeing alternatives to mainstream solutions but focusing on alternatives for a single company is not the end goal for me. You can go with Apple, Google or Microsoft and get a nice packaged solution for email, calendar, contacts, music, storage, etc and the end goal for me would not be switching to separate packages. The end goal would be to have a self-hosted easy to install and solution, OwnCloud is almost there for 90% of what I want but it doesn't maintain my email. There is no solution for me unless it's easy and all works seamlessly together, like Google and the rest have.
pseut 14y ago
Note that you can often get jabber/xmpp from your email provider: e.g. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/features_chat.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/features_chat.html
b2spirit 14y ago
Google's primary objective is not money, but information gathering and control. The move to Google+ is a centralisation of the information repository. Google Glass is an attempt at getting more detailed personal information. The autonomous vehicle development is for them to control your vehicle.
felipebueno 14y ago
I totally agree with your thoughts and concerns. It sounds like my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535181
DanBC 14y ago
I don't care about reader or RSS. I do care about Google's decision to avoid paying tax. This may be legal, but it's shady. Thus, I'm starting to not use Google provided services. It's a shame because Google Search (web, at least) really is very good, despite occasional weirdness. Here's some screenshots (http://imgur.com/a/u1zj6 http://imgur.com/a/u1zj6) of my results. (Note that suicidegirls is NSFW) [suicidegirls dutch doctors want to kill little babies] gives this URL (https://www.google.co.uk/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors+want+to+kill+little+babies&oq=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors+want+to+kill+little+babies&gs_l=hp.3...631.9034.0.9122.53.41.0.1.1.0.312.4667.1j25j4j1.31.0...0.0...1c.1.9.psy-ab.Mk4wE-lsAIY&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45512109,d.d2k&fp=24006220c2dff3f4&biw=1280&bih=713 https://www.google.co.uk/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&#...) But [suicidegirls dutch doctors] gives this url (https://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors&oq=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors&gs_l=hp.3...120198.120198.1.120595.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.9.psy-ab.kPe0DhqLH_I&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45512109,d.d2k&fp=24006220c2dff3f4&biw=1280&bih=713 https://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+...)
AznHisoka 14y ago
What about the products advertisers/publishers use? Adsense and Adwords.
ganarajpr 14y ago
This reminds me of a kid, lying flat in the middle of a super market, revolting with his parents because they didn't buy a toy he liked..
tonylemesmer 14y ago
The main Google services I use are Gmail, Android and Search. I would be mainly interested in replacing Gmail and tried (I have a personal domain with mail forwarded to Gmail). I use Gmail mainly because of its excellent spam blocking but also the Android experience is very good. I tried getting rid of Gmail last year but failed due to not finding a decent email client on Android that wasn't Gmail. Any suggestions? Please don't suggest K-9. For search I am now trying DuckDuckGo. I'm a mechanical engineer so will give this a few weeks to see if it affects my day to day fact finding.
Bjorkbat 14y ago
You know, I've come to think of Google as less of a corporation and more of a country lately. Most of their products act more like a sort of public service for their citizens, subsidized through ad revenue rather than taxes. So far, it's had a pretty good track record for a country, no doubt due to the fact that it's still technically a corporation, but still, not too bad. Still, it has its issues. There are many countries that can only dream of obtaining the data Google has on its citizens. Many of them have tried, and thankfully, for the time being, Google has been more or less protective of this data. Then there's their whole policy of axing infrastructure and services (products) whenever they deem fit, and by fit I mean unprofitable. Depending on your political views, this can be seen as either irresponsible or efficient. Regardless, its inconvenient for those who were using the service, and most efforts to put a service on the chopping block have something to do with trying to get more people to migrate to Google+, possibly to collect more data and serve up more ads, a very bizarre synthesis of increasing taxes and surveillance. So maybe Google doesn't want to be a country of the internet. Tough. That's what they grew into, and the only way to avoid it is to shrink and pivot and lay off a lot of people who are essentially the Google equivalent of government employees. Until then, we're right to be critical and cautious towards Google's actions, a responsibility even, otherwise they're liable to really screw up.

Expunging Google

289 points by duncan_bayne 14y ago

zalew 14y ago

> Bing Maps looks like a potential alternative why not openstreetmaps?

joahua 14y ago
It's pretty incomplete for parts of the world, and certain applications require accuracy (or at least completeness). The answer, of course, is to contribute, but when your core business isn't mapping that's hard to propose as a viable fix. Parts of the world in my case ~= Sydney, which has a decent number of geeks per capita to contribute. OSM is wonderful, but has a way to go before it's a viable solution for everyone.
- incanus77 14y ago
  Check out MapBox and http://ideditor.com http://ideditor.com.
  - joahua 14y ago
    iDeditor is great! Leagues ahead of other OSM interfaces I've seen :) Did MapBox have anything to do with it? Polished! Love the walkthrough! I've just recently discovered (and love) TileMill.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Second that. Google maps are surprisingly bad in a number of first-world countries like France or Israel; OpenStreetMap are very very detailed. I don't think Bing maps would be better than either of those.

stonith 14y ago

Adding the missing features (email + maps) to owncloud would appear to be the neatest way to go. Then target something like the openstack API and you can move between providers pretty easily. The bit that bugs me is how to deal with rolling your own maps provider, but if you're willing to compromise on having access to all maps all the time it wouldn't be so hard.

kylec 14y ago

One alternative to Google Groups is 37signals' Breeze: http://basecamp.com/breeze http://basecamp.com/breeze $20 one-time payment to create a group email list.

g3rald 14y ago

For companies like Google we are mere merchandise, as we do not generate sufficient profits they discard us, well done ...

cromwellian 14y ago

"It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web" That's a pretty bold claim and an epic overreaction, especially given that Google currently derives 97% of its revenue from the Web, and if it goes away, it would be very problematic for Google.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
The Web is a small subset of the Internet. There are many other protocols to enable the sharing of data between individuals and platforms, and it looks like Google wishes to deprecate at least some of those in favour of its own end-to-end solution. I think that killing off Reader in favour of G+ is the start of acceleration in that direction. I hope I'm wrong.
- cromwellian 14y ago
  First of all, the quote, from you, specifically says "open Web" not "open Internet" Secondly, Reader was not killed because of G+. If FriendFeed is finally killed off, will you say it was because Facebook needed the resources and engineers on a competing product? Consumers have moved on to desire the kinds of features that are inherent in services like Facebook, and RSS simply isn't suited to solving the problem of federated social networking. There is no open standard for this, remember, Google tried it with PubHubSubHub/WebFinger/OpenID/OAuth/ActivityStreams but it didn't work. I favor federated feeds as well (see my essay http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...), but honestly, for me personally, RSS was a HUGE step back from what I had on USENET in the 80s with RN/TRN. Someone must create a new, open federated social networking platform, but honestly, you can't put the cart before the horse. Google tried that several times and failed. First, you've got to built a super successful platform consumers love, then you can standardize it. The history of doing it the other way is littered with failure. Remember OpenSocial? I don't think Google has lost sight of the Open Web, I think it just realized that you must focus on the end user design issues first if you want to be successful. Ignore this at your peril, look at the way consumers flock to native apps on mobile. They care about experiences, not implementation. If the "open web" specs don't do the job, then you need to create a product first that consumers show they want, and then work backwards to figure out how to fix the specs.

dools 14y ago

Great list! I had already been eyeballing fastmail but hadn't seen ownCloud. Will check it out, thanks! I agree with you on the Android front, too. Although I'm still struggling to get a new qwerty after my pro+ died :(

tonylemesmer 14y ago
Also check out http://aerofs.com/ http://aerofs.com/ (I prefer this to Owncloud)

ok_craig 14y ago

I still think this is all ridiculous. Stopping support for a product that uses a certain standard doesn't mean you're against that standard, unless you're a conspiracy theorist. You can argue that they're against certain open standards if you want, but the canceling of Reader isn't actually evidence of that. Simultaneously putting effort into G+ is also not evidence of that. It's not even symbolic of that. It is only evidence of shifting product priorities, not outright opposition to open standards. The singular data point that I can think of as being anti-standard is the pending drop of CalDAV for Calendar, which I personally think sucks. But nobody ever cites that. Everybody's pissed that Google canceled a product that they liked, and that's what's driving this never-ending criticism.

lobster_johnson 14y ago
The main problem with Google at the moment is the centralization of many popular services into one corporate entity. Video, search, email etc. are all now in the hands of, mostly, Google. With so few viable competitors, you get a de-factory monopoly as well as insane growth. The centralization itself is the problem. Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass and autonomous cars, Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated, and Google does not seem to care much about Internet standards or about being ethical.
- numbchuckskills 14y ago
  "Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated " - you're joking right?
- ok_craig 14y ago
  I can get behind your first paragraph, which is basically just saying that as a consumer you like to support variety and a dynamic market by using services from multiple providers. If that's you're goal, that's a reasonable enough justification for me. However, that's not a reaction that would come as a direct result of one product cancellation (because it is a proactive, not reactive perspective), and my comment is in response to the post, which explicitly claims the reason for expunging Google is due to Google's supposed new opposition to open standards. I really don't understand your angle with the second paragraph though. It's just the kind of stuff that's going to make this all devolve into a battle of words about who the best/worst/most evil/most creative/most underdog/most overvalued/undervalued/deserving/undeserving companies are. Frankly a generalization like that without any specifics or context is a fanboy thing to say. If you're trying to tell me that Google is a stagnating company doing more net harm than good, all I think it's worth to say is that I think you're terribly wrong, and I disagree.

richardjordan 14y ago

Most important thing is to not get so entrenched in one technology vendor or another. They are not part of you. You're not an Apple person or a Google person - that's just how companies want you to think. Don't let technology choices become part of who you think you are. Use tech that helps you until it doesn't. Always have an exit plan. Don't get emotionally attached to one company or emotionally put off another. They're corporations. The don't care about you. Thy offer a service. If that service comes as part of a trade you're comfortable with use it, else don't.

mrich 14y ago
This is the comment that should be at the top of this thread.

parennoob 14y ago

I don't think Google is 'actively working against an open web', but the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+ makes me reconsider every time they open up a new service (didn't even glance at Keep, for example. Remember what happened to Google Notebook?) It's nice to have open source alternatives, and possibly to help them grow. If a lot more people start using, say, ownCloud, it will probably help develop it into a more robust and usable platform. Also, as a hacker, having a stack of my own software side-by-side with my current Google/Apple stack will probably help me learn more as I use it more, and will give me something to fall back on in case Google shutters it.

cromwellian 14y ago
"the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+" There's a lot of erroneous assumptions in there. Reader was never really a product with much support, it was more a labor of love of a small dedicated team. Reader was not shutdown to "make way for G+" anymore than any of the other spring cleaned services were shut down because of competing services. Even the original (ex-Googler now) Reader engineers have pretty much outlined many of the reasons, including the decline of RSS, which was killed off in large part by people moving to services like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. It's really regretable, but it's time to realize that the rest of the world moved on, and if we want federated, open services, it's going to have to built from the ground up, and in a way that users, not hackers, will want to use it.

logn 14y ago

I don't know about replacing Google with DDG. I'd prefer an engine that actually does its own indexing. Yandex is the only alternative that fits the bill in my mind: http://www.yandex.com http://www.yandex.com Also, so happy to learn about ownCloud. As a developer, I'm a little disappointed to see AGPL licensing, but it's probably a smart choice and I use that license in some projects.

dublinben 14y ago
DDG actually pulls its results from Yandex and several other sources. Why limit yourself to a single, old-fashioned crawler, when you can use one of the most innovative meta-search engines? http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399 http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399
- logn 14y ago
  Meta-search is a pretty old idea too. And you're at the mercy of your sources and have less insight into the data you're searching and less ability to rank pages.

lessnonymous 14y ago

FYI: Fastmail, while still developed in Australia, is now owned by Opera Software.

3825 14y ago
I'd like to give credit to Google where it is due. With takeout, it is very easy to get quite a bit of your information. You already could get your emails by IMAP or POP but still Google set a standard with Takeout :) This makes it possible for someone to just pack his bags and leave. This is also the reason why I am staying.

yanw 14y ago

I try to avoid these sorts of submissions, mainly because of their non-content and the subsequent familiar discussion, but somehow they keep reaching the front page. It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”. Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”: http://www.webrtc.org http://www.webrtc.org http://www.chromium.org http://www.chromium.org And their various web speed efforts: https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed And of course: https://fiber.google.com https://fiber.google.com I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader. Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
Thanks - I've corrected that error. See my other comments on this item for rebuttal of your other points :)
kyrias 14y ago
Huh, Firefox hasn't dropped RSS support? The button is just not in the Awesomebar anymore.
josteink 14y ago
Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”: http://www.chromium.org That's funny. I see Chromium as their OSS alibi for doing whatever non-standard they want with open-web HTML, which doesn't exist in any other browser. But now it's not "proprietary", because it's in a OS code-repo somewhere. So now it's "standards" even though it hasn't been submitted, ratified or approved yet. And everyone else, if they dont want Google's stuff to work poorly in their browser, has to be a dog and follow Google's leash. I consider Chromium some of the worst damage Google has done to the open web.

nfoz 14y ago

Stop whining and build something better. Reader was never a very good RSS reader anyway. You can do better.

adamors 14y ago
Reader was a great RSS archiver and syncer though.

ternaryoperator 14y ago

owncloud was an interesting item on his replacement list. Has anyone else used owncloud and can vouch for it? If so, are you self-hosting it or using a commercial host? If the latter, which one?

xradionut 14y ago
I was mildly interested in it until I saw the letters PHP, then lost interest.

ternaryoperator 14y ago

owncloud was an interesting item on his replacement list. Has anyone else used owncloud and can vouch for it? If so, are you self-hosting it or using a commercial host? If the latter, which one?

rentzsch 14y ago

I've barely used it, but http://librelist.com http://librelist.com seems like a potential Google Groups replacement.

niggler 14y ago

I've asked multiple times about adding subdomains to distinguish repos from blogs, but it appears that this is a workaround that no subdomain reporting would detect

xwei 14y ago

I use all the products you listed. And I will not attack a company just because of a product. If you just want to be popular? you did it. Kid.

zobzu 14y ago

For maps you may want to try here.com It's not bad - faster than gmaps too

olalonde 14y ago
Hmmm Laval shows up before Montreal... I think I'll keep using Google Maps for now.
- ernesth 14y ago
  Google Maps has its share of little cities showing before big ones. I currently see a Digoin on the map of France whereas Saint-Étienne, Clermont-Ferrand, Bourges (or Laval) do not appear...

lettergram 14y ago

I have seen many of these posts recently and I honestly do not understand. I use Google products and it definitely beats out most of the competition and doesn't interfere with anything worse than any other product out there. Sure the internet is changing, and you can either go with it (or not). Switching to many different products to complete the same tasks (many of them worse than Google products) seems kind of silly to me.

felipelalli 14y ago

exagerado.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
Nah, farsighted :) Seriously, you just wait. If you're a user on a commercial system you didn't pay for (Google, Facebook, etc.) then you're not a customer, you're cattle. Your value is directly proportional to how much the company running the system knows about you. I don't like where Facebook is going, and I think Google is following in their footsteps, albeit helped along by an excellent reputation for quality and fair play, especially amongst geeks. Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons.
- jmesserly 14y ago
  > Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I think Google is playing the same 'embrace and extend' card as Microsoft did back in the day, just for slightly different reasons. I see this meme a lot, but I don't get it how the analogy is supposed to work. There is actual evidence that Microsoft in the 90's was trying to sabotage standard protocols and open source software, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents. The key part of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy was extending the standard in proprietary ways, thus making it incompatible and no longer implementable via open source software, thus killing it. I don't get how any of this applies to any web company, where nearly the entire business is based on the web and the standards that back it. It's no wonder that many of these companies contribute back to the web standards and open source software. Sure, these contributions are in the company's interests--but that's the whole point. We reached a time when it's in interests of many big (and small) corporations to contribute to open source and standards (including Microsoft!). Some people see efforts to improve standards or contribute new ones as somehow bad, "embrace and extend". When actually it's the opposite: investing in the commons to promote its welfare. Obligatory disclaimer: speaking for myself here, not any employer past or present.
  - 14y ago

ebbv 14y ago

This is not conscious consumerism. This is a childish temper tantrum. Chrome has better developer tools. If your job is being a web dev and you purposely make your job harder because you're mad at Google for shutting down Reader, you're not being rational.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
I'll still happily use Chromium for web development, as and where necessary. Just not signed in to Google for sync, etc. etc. I do wonder though ... would you have described the formation of the FSF as a childish temper tantrum? I remember the days when to use Linux as a development OS was painful ... it worked out well in the end though :)
- magicalist 14y ago
  I don't entirely agree with the GP's phrasing, but it's worth pointing out that the FSF doesn't paint all a company's software with the same brush. They're happy to rail against non-free software while accepting contributions to GNU projects from the same developers.
- jxi 14y ago
  FSF is an ideal. The ideal that all software is open source so that it's more secure and has all the other benefits of open source. What you're doing is being childish. "Boo hoo, big bad Google killed a product I liked, so I'm going to make some bullshit arguments to stop using ALL their products." I don't use all of Google's products, but I use a subset because they get the job done well. If you think killing off reader was a bad idea, why not build your own and see how the cost/benefit ratio pays off. What problem are you even solving by doing this? You're just throwing a childish fit.
  - duncan_bayne 14y ago
    I don't think it was a bad idea, I think it was a very good idea from their perspective. I think that what they're trying to do is a bad idea for everyone, which is why I've changed platform. Why do you assume I'm angry about it?

ahoge 14y ago

RSS just isn't very popular. Firefox also removed that RSS icon from the address bar a few months ago. Do you think Mozilla did that because they "oppose the open web"? No, of course they don't. They got rid of it because virtually no one used it.

alexeston 14y ago

Just like everybody else said, Google is not moving against the open web. Rather the opposite. The only thing I agree with is the part where Google tries to get everybody to use Google only, which makes sense considering Google can be compared to a small empire. I mean, has anyone seen the office buildings that Google has? As for Chrome, I think Webkit (or now Blink) is where web happens fastest. All new web experiments are done with -webkit, not -moz-, and you gotta go where the majority goes. In this case anyway. I haven't used gmail for a long time tho', because I didn't like that the content of my emails get used for ads - so I set up my own email server for personal usage. Other then that, maps, search .. it does what I need it to do so whether it tracks me or whatever is just the cost of the service.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
woe 14y ago
> and you gotta go where the majority goes ... which is why we all still use Internet Explorer.
bzbarsky 14y ago
> All new web experiments are done with -webkit, not -moz- Uh... That happens to not be true. But WebKit does have much better (and better-funded) marketing.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cageface 14y ago

I understand why people are reluctant to trust a single corporation with so much control over their personal information, particularly when, as they say, the user is as much the product as the customer. I'm generally a big defender of Google but even I am disquieted by their maneuvering around Google+. However, I also doubt it's possible to build services as sophisticated as GMail on direct payments from users. I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to pay what it would cost to build and run a service like GMail without ads.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
> I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to > pay what it would cost to build and run a service like > GMail without ads. What do you think the problem would be? I'm using Fastmail now, and not missing anything from Gmail. All for $50 / month.
- cageface 14y ago
  I tried Fastmail last year and maybe my impressions are out of date but it can't compete on features at all. The web interface is stone age compared to gmail, search is far slower and less sophisticated, spam filtering was not as good etc. No native apps are available for mobile. Fastmail isn't bad but I don't consider them to be in the same league.
  - gcb0 14y ago
    Zimbra was a good alternative, but yahoo bought it and crapped it out
  - alexmuller 14y ago
    The new Fastmail webmail interface is actually massively on-par with Gmail. It's very slick and I'd encourage everyone to give it a(nother) go.
  - woe 14y ago
    FastMail is a fantastic IMAP email service and a very good webmail service, but it's a very poor mobile email service - for access from smartphones and tablets (including contacts and calendar syncing) it falls woefully short.

czk 14y ago

Streeme is a good alternative to Google Music https://code.google.com/p/streeme/ https://code.google.com/p/streeme/

tikhonj 14y ago

Even assuming Google is not being malicious--and I think that's a broadly safe assumption--I'm still concerned. I'm am significantly over-reliant on Google's serviced: my email, my calendar, my OpenID, my web search, my videos, my phone, my maps, my web browser... (Well, I do use Firefox now.) It's a single point of failure. A rather scary one at that. Some of these things do not have good alternatives. My phone? I could use an iPhone or Windows phone, but Apple and Microsoft are malicious. Also, they both hate Linux. But the other things? I probably could--and probably should--move some of them to a different service, if only in the interest of diversification. Of course, I've been meaning to do this for a while. But I haven't. In many different, usually small ways, I'm hooked into Google. That by itself worries me; in some cases, even if I did want to move to a different service, it would not be easy. Very importantly, this is not Google's fault at all--in fact, they're very good about making my data portable. It's entirely poor planning on my part. Yet it's still an issue. Perhaps the worst part--or the best part--is that I don't have any immediate problems with this situation. Everything works. Quite well. I just have a general sense of disquiet about it all. Just something to think about.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
Disquet. That's _exactly_ it, and I wish I'd thought to use that word in the first place. You're right that Google is still better than Apple and Microsoft. I'm still hoping that Ubuntu for phones gets some traction, I'd love for a truly general-purpose pocket computer.
- zjmichen 14y ago
  If Canonical doesn't turn evil too. Some of their actions give me pause. Oh but man I want Ubuntu phone to be good.
  - duncan_bayne 14y ago
    Ditto ... it could be so awesome. I can do most of my dev work on a low-spec ARM box, given a decent keyboard and display. Bluetooth keyboard, some sort of projector ... I'm excited.

h2s 14y ago

I'm planning to do exactly this, myself. Not so much because of any perceived danger to the open web posed by Google, but because I've come to realise that I simply have too many eggs in their basket. Tellingly, my list of products that I will be replacing is almost completely different to this person's. Google has become the Walmart of computing and it's time to resist.

jay_kyburz 14y ago

I would find this a lot harder. I have 6 applications running on Google App Engine. I use Analytics to track stats in them. I use Ad Sense and Ad words to help monetise them. I have 2 apps for business accounts each with separate gmail, calendar and docs. One for personal life one for business. Crome is significantly better than both Safari and Firefox on my Mac laptop event though I use both and have all three browsers open, each has a different google account loged into it.

Kiro 14y ago

I'm doing the opposite.

tbirdz 14y ago

I might recommend uzing Zoho mail instead of fastmail. I've used it for a while now and it's very nice.

jrockway 14y ago

By these standards, it would seem that every company on Earth is "opposed to an open web" because they don't make available a free web-based RSS reader.

pavs 14y ago

Also: Self-Host Everything http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/

lnanek2 14y ago

Reminds me of Android Market. Used to be OK for getting apps, but now it is going to shove music and video search results in my face every chance it gets with annoying screens between me and the app search results and annoying continue shopping screens after each app. If I wanted those things, I'd be in the other apps for them, like Google Books or whatever. Of course I'm never in that particular one because Amazon Kindle is so much better. I'm sure if I liked music or video then Google wouldn't be my choice either. I tried to get 300 once for someone and it had a search result for it, but wouldn't show me the page. Then I bought batman instead and it just gave me a license error whenever I tried to watch it. Really would have been better to migrate Android Market/Google Play as soon as someone else made an app store on Android, and there are many, rather than trusting Google not to sell out their users. With Google you invest time in a product, then basically it gets shut down or co-opted into something you don't want. A startup you like getting bought by Google is pretty much the worst thing possible since generally they'll just kill the product. Guess I should go through this list and get off their other services proactively. It just isn't worth trusting Google where you don't have to.

RWeaver 14y ago

People want their news curated, either through hacker news, reddit, Google plus or something else. For a minority RSS was their preference, but for everyone else Google correctly shifted their resources to the future. RIP RSS, you had your day in the sun and lead the way for better products.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
That's a false dichotomy - I can consume curated news through RSS just fine. Trivium is one of my favourite feeds, for example. The only difference between using RSS and following the author on FB/G+/Twitter is that I can use any client I want, and neither of us has to use yet another web service.

dannyr 14y ago

I'm a bit speechless with this post. I have seen overreaction from people when Google shut down Reader. I told myself that the craziest of those overreactions would be for somebody to quit all of Google's services. Then I saw this article and I thought he was trolling. Sadly he is not.

emilis_info 14y ago

Switching to Firefox will not save you. I recently found out that Firefox sends a request to safebrowsing.clients.google.com for every page I visit. I found out how to disable it, but it wasn't straightforward and there were still requests sent to Google for other things. Safe browsing is in Firefox Preferences "Security" tab under "Block reported attack sites" + "Block reported web forgeries". Search for "goog" in about:config to find more interesting things. LiveHTTPHeaders extension is also an eye-opener, because Firebug usually doesn't show these requests.

magicalist 14y ago
sniff the connection rather than jumping to conclusions (and especially before telling people to disable a safety feature of their browser). Safe browsing does not send the addresses you visit over the wire. The protocol was very carefully designed to be both fast updating and not expose any information about the sites you visit. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocolv2Spec https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocol... edit: just to save time for others parsing the protocol page, and it's been a while since I've read it, so someone please correct me if I have this wrong, but Firefox (and Chrome, and maybe others, not sure) stores a local set of the first 32 bits of the 256-bit hashes of all the sites currently marked as hosting malware or whatever. Your browser pings fairly often to get an updated version of this set of sites. When you visit a page, the canonicalized name of the page you're on is hashed and the first 32 bits are compared against the database of prefixes. If there is a collision (I believe there are usually a few hundred thousand entries of the 2^32 available hash prefixes), only the first 32 bits of the hash of the page you're on is sent to google, as a request for the set of full hashes of malicious pages that begin with that prefix, which allows for the final, very much local, check. This saves a bunch of time and bandwidth, and lets you get a last minute double check that the page is still bad with no one able to work out what page you're actually on.

chmike 14y ago

When I registered on Quora by using my GoogleId, I was very surprised to see Quora asking me to send an email invite to all my Android phone contacts. Google handed over all the emails of my Android phone contacts to Quora ! Is this what I get from using Android and synchronization ? I didn't see an opt out of that. I'm now waiting for Ubuntu phone, while hoping that they don't try to monetize it using similar abuse of monopole. The Ubuntu desktop spam still hurts. Also, when connecting to my Youtube account, google ask me regularly to use my real name and there is no button to reply just no and don't ever ask me anymore! Google is lowering the barrier for competitors ! Same thing for Twitter and Facebook.

fpgeek 14y ago
No, that's what you get when you don't read the permissions you are granting. Here is the permission request I saw: Quora is requesting permission to: View basic information about your account View your email address Manage your contacts Given that, you shouldn't be at all surprised that Quora was able to figure out your phone contacts.
- chmike 14y ago
  I agree but this means that I can't register in quora with my googleId without giving Quora all my emails. Since I don't use facebook and twitter what options are left ? I do want to use googleId authentication to access Quora but why would that imply I have to give all my emails to Quora ? Why can't I decide about that ? Why is Google imposing that to me ? Is this a commercial deal between Google and Quora ?
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    Google isn't imposing anything, AFAIK. The permissions exist because there are reasonable applications that might want them (e.g. contact sync). Quora is deciding what permissions to ask for. They could ask for more or less (other sites/services do), but they don't.

aray 14y ago

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, this is (to me) why being able to export your data is a first class requirement of a service. For these listed, there's takeout: https://www.google.com/takeout/ https://www.google.com/takeout/ Backing up your online data from services should be just as common (and practiced) as backing up harddrives or important information. You decide which services you want to use, but give yourself the flexibility to move if and when circumstances change.

maxwell2022 14y ago

Good for you...

jpkeisala 14y ago

This is exactly like in nineties and also later some were trying to do anti-microsoft movement.

rmrfrmrf 14y ago

Cool. Now show me how you're going to expunge server-side Google Analytics from your life.

oelmekki 14y ago
If you mean replacing analytics for your website, piwik is the answer : http://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/ If you mean not being tracked by analytics, well, it's quite simple : # cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com googleadservices.com edit: formatting
- rmrfrmrf 14y ago
  I was talking about actual server-side analytics includes. Pretty sure the only way around it is to spoof your user agent data or use a proxy.

jimbosis 14y ago

For replacing Google Groups, you should check out Groupsapces, a UK company. http://groupspaces.com/ http://groupspaces.com/ A free plan gets you two lists of 50 members, and there are many paid options. I've been using it for a group in my local community for over a year now and am very pleased with the product.

laumars 14y ago

Google Talk uses an open protocol, XMPP. So basically any client that support XMPP should (hopefully) work with Google Talk. This means you wouldn't have to migrate your friends / family over to a new client but you can still expunge Google's IM client specifically.

prg318 14y ago
Google just recently reinstated federated XMPP for their Google Talk service [1] so you can talk to peers on other XMPP servers. I use an XMPP server that has been provided to me by my e-mail provider (lavabit.com) to chat with my friends/family that use Google Talk without any issues. [1] http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-April/001672.html http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-April/001672...

overshard 14y ago

I love these articles and seeing alternatives to mainstream solutions but focusing on alternatives for a single company is not the end goal for me. You can go with Apple, Google or Microsoft and get a nice packaged solution for email, calendar, contacts, music, storage, etc and the end goal for me would not be switching to separate packages. The end goal would be to have a self-hosted easy to install and solution, OwnCloud is almost there for 90% of what I want but it doesn't maintain my email. There is no solution for me unless it's easy and all works seamlessly together, like Google and the rest have.

pseut 14y ago

Note that you can often get jabber/xmpp from your email provider: e.g. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/features_chat.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/features_chat.html

b2spirit 14y ago

Google's primary objective is not money, but information gathering and control. The move to Google+ is a centralisation of the information repository. Google Glass is an attempt at getting more detailed personal information. The autonomous vehicle development is for them to control your vehicle.

felipebueno 14y ago

I totally agree with your thoughts and concerns. It sounds like my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535181

DanBC 14y ago

I don't care about reader or RSS. I do care about Google's decision to avoid paying tax. This may be legal, but it's shady. Thus, I'm starting to not use Google provided services. It's a shame because Google Search (web, at least) really is very good, despite occasional weirdness. Here's some screenshots (http://imgur.com/a/u1zj6 http://imgur.com/a/u1zj6) of my results. (Note that suicidegirls is NSFW) [suicidegirls dutch doctors want to kill little babies] gives this URL (https://www.google.co.uk/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors+want+to+kill+little+babies&oq=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors+want+to+kill+little+babies&gs_l=hp.3...631.9034.0.9122.53.41.0.1.1.0.312.4667.1j25j4j1.31.0...0.0...1c.1.9.psy-ab.Mk4wE-lsAIY&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45512109,d.d2k&fp=24006220c2dff3f4&biw=1280&bih=713 https://www.google.co.uk/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&#...) But [suicidegirls dutch doctors] gives this url (https://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors&oq=suicidegirls+dutch+doctors&gs_l=hp.3...120198.120198.1.120595.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.9.psy-ab.kPe0DhqLH_I&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45512109,d.d2k&fp=24006220c2dff3f4&biw=1280&bih=713 https://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=suicidegirls+...)

AznHisoka 14y ago

What about the products advertisers/publishers use? Adsense and Adwords.

ganarajpr 14y ago

This reminds me of a kid, lying flat in the middle of a super market, revolting with his parents because they didn't buy a toy he liked..

tonylemesmer 14y ago

The main Google services I use are Gmail, Android and Search. I would be mainly interested in replacing Gmail and tried (I have a personal domain with mail forwarded to Gmail). I use Gmail mainly because of its excellent spam blocking but also the Android experience is very good. I tried getting rid of Gmail last year but failed due to not finding a decent email client on Android that wasn't Gmail. Any suggestions? Please don't suggest K-9. For search I am now trying DuckDuckGo. I'm a mechanical engineer so will give this a few weeks to see if it affects my day to day fact finding.

Bjorkbat 14y ago

You know, I've come to think of Google as less of a corporation and more of a country lately. Most of their products act more like a sort of public service for their citizens, subsidized through ad revenue rather than taxes. So far, it's had a pretty good track record for a country, no doubt due to the fact that it's still technically a corporation, but still, not too bad. Still, it has its issues. There are many countries that can only dream of obtaining the data Google has on its citizens. Many of them have tried, and thankfully, for the time being, Google has been more or less protective of this data. Then there's their whole policy of axing infrastructure and services (products) whenever they deem fit, and by fit I mean unprofitable. Depending on your political views, this can be seen as either irresponsible or efficient. Regardless, its inconvenient for those who were using the service, and most efforts to put a service on the chopping block have something to do with trying to get more people to migrate to Google+, possibly to collect more data and serve up more ads, a very bizarre synthesis of increasing taxes and surveillance. So maybe Google doesn't want to be a country of the internet. Tough. That's what they grew into, and the only way to avoid it is to shrink and pivot and lay off a lot of people who are essentially the Google equivalent of government employees. Until then, we're right to be critical and cautious towards Google's actions, a responsibility even, otherwise they're liable to really screw up.