Can’t… resist… Google… can’t… resist…
I think I’ve been somewhat hypocritical about Google. On the one hand, since I started blogging, I voiced occasional criticism of Google, concern about it collecting all this information about us, and the fact that its search algorithm is turning into a lens through which we comprehend reality. On the other hand, I am using many of Google’s services, because, what can you do, they create great products. The result of this self search – I am not really doing what I preach.
I tried to think about all the Google products I use (from the most to the least used I think)… Google, Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Youtube, Google docs, Google Calendar, G-Talk, Google Analytics… so whom am I kidding about being a careful user of Google’s products? Just about a year ago, II used to log off my Google account when I did not need it, but I noticed that I am not doing it anymore. So maybe it is time to stop pretending and simply embrace it?
What would it mean for me to embrace it? I guess it would mainly mean dropping some of my clients and switching completely to Google application. Today, I use Gmail with MS Outlook client and I refer to Google calendar or Google docs only for group projects. “Embracing” would probably mean skipping MS Outlook and relying solely on the web applications. I think I would also start using i-Google.
My main concern in this case is backup. A while ago, I had a very unpleasant encounter with Google, when I got locked out of my Gmail account for almost a week. There was nobody to talk to, because Google does not have a costumer support in a traditional sense and was really bad with getting back on the service requests submitted through its online support. If that happens when Google is my main organizational tool, I will be in big trouble. But maybe there are backup solutions that I am not aware of?
What do you think?
It seems I even found an error in mighty google, specifically about the e-mail system.
I am one of those strange people – I access my Gmail via IMAP, and also sync the data to my own computer.
I rely on google, but i constantly sync the information to other systems. It just happens that google is the best at what they do.
Note that although they are using open standards, and you can access gmail over POP3 IMAP etc. The code for running gmail itself is closed, thats our main problem of tracking whats going on, or moving to another “gmail” provider. No one has done such a good implementation of a webmail client after all.
Before that, I used their POP3 service. But it seems to have implementation problems when you start pulling e-mail from multiple clients. Only one gets the mails (I need to find the time to blog about it. Finding such a fundemental error in implementation in google is big).
About the backups:
I have developed a saying – in 30 years or so, a lot of people family photos will be lost because the average user does not backup their data. We seem to be at an era where we generate tons of data, but we don’t back it up, and we don’t make sure that it would be accessible with technology we might have in 30 years from now.
How about something like this:
http://lifehacker.com/software/gmail/geek-to-live–back-up-gmail-with-fetchmail-235207.ph ?
Thank you, Guy, for the comments! And, Veronica, we will have to check that utility out… be prepared :)