Put Not Your Faith In Google

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1105057.post-57948314069902422132009-02-10T18:21:00.000-08:002009-02-10T18:38:26.731-08:00Put Not Your Faith In GoogleI 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 <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/sunbird/addon/4631">Provider for Google Calendar</a> to synchronize Sunbird with Google calendar. Then I use <a href="http://www.google.com/mobile/default/sync.html">Google Sync</a> 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 <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/7307">Google Contacts</a> 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? <img src="http://dkgoodman.com/blogpics/smiley.gif" style="border:0; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:0"> Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: Links <a href="http://dkgoodman.com/2009/02/put-not-your-faith-in-google.html#comments">Comments</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1105057-5794831406990242213?l=dkgoodman.com%2Fblog.html'/></div>dkgoodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06731373688572121714noreply@blogger.com2