GMail is excellent at search and spam filtering, everything else is just a standard e-mail service. The tutorial points out how you can at least try and match the level of spam filtering with the community based Pyzor.
Don't underestimate search though. Being able to quickly find information (content, contacts, etc.) from years of unstructured eMail communication with a simple search box is very powerful. At work I have to use Lotus Notes and Outlook and compared to Gmail they really seem stone age when it comes to find information in the archive.
Very true. Gmail does that very well, but that's not something you cannot solve if you are very disciplined on how you use, store and archive emails. Gmail makes it frictionless, and that's probably one of its biggest assets, but in some workplaces, as you mentioned, people are forced to use Notes or Outlook and you learn to live with it. It's not always as frustrating as you might think. For example, I am certainly much more "messy" in the way i use email with Gmail since I know I can find things easily, but that may be a disservice to act this way in the end. You form bad habits.
I may be an outlier, but I like GMail first and foremost for its interface. Ever since I started using conversation view, it's just seemed like the obvious way to show e-mail. Nothing else really matches it, although Geary is trying now.
Fastmail is nice. I'd love to host my email on my home server, but from what I can tell, to send SMTP I either need to get a static IP (costly / impossible) or use some smpt routing service, in which case not that much is gained from self-hosting.
I wrote about how I use Google-alternatives here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718126
An addendum to that, since the article mentioned Music and OwnCloud: I use Subsonic to stream my music collection, the Android app is very nice in how it caches so I always feel like I have full access to my complete collection without getting huge mobile data bills; I don't think OwnCloud's music app can match Subsonic quite yet.
Thanks from FastMail for the kind words too :) Quite agree about keeping outbound SMTP working. We spend quite a lot of time and effort in both keeping our outbound email relatively clean to stay off blocking lists, and making sure we support all the latest signing, DNS magic, whatever antispam tricks are in existence to improve the reputation of our IPs.
ZoHo Mail isn't bad, I've been using that instead of Google Apps at the moment. Ideally I want to switch to my own server but I never relish the thought of setting one up.
Isn't this something like pre-mature optimization? Most services (like Blogger for example) haven't shut down yet and probably won't. So, just because Google didn't support some open source protocol, doesn't mean we should suddenly decide to move away from a service that's really been good so far.
If the service is good enough, then why bother switching providers? At the end of the day all businesses want to profit . Also, it's a matter of personal preference - Some like Gmail and some like Hotmail. But moving away from a really good provider because it doesn't provide a 'feature X' (unless it impacts you in anyway and makes it unusable) then I see no point in moving away at all.
Because you see the trend coming. I just logged in my Picasa web albums a few days ago after a long time and now it defaults into Google + photos BS. The problem is, there are no more RSS feeds in Google + Photos. So I Have to use Google + to get access to these pictures, unless I revert to Picasa Web Albums. But it's clear Google will kill off Picasa Web Albums down the road and the RSS feeds for your pictures as well. It goes against my interest as a user, so I will actively be looking for ways out of Google as well. It's not a "win-win" situation anymore.
And what online service are you going to find that a) stays up forever and b) never radically changes the UI? Let's say you find a photo hosting service to does RSS feeds, what guarantees to you have it'll last longer than Google? For christsakes, Reader lasted 8 years for a free service, there are many non-advertising/pay-fee services that have not lasted that long.
This seems silly. Google has been consistently less evil than Microsoft, Apple, and even Amazon, and has the best services.
I'm all for alternatives (especially open source and non-US based alternatives), but if Google is still the most convenient service provider at the moment, I'll continue using them.
I have been somewhat of a Google fanboy (alright, too strong-a-term, but you get the idea).
I encourage people to leave Google - because you know what? If enough people leave, Google will fight EVEN harder to stop blanket monitoring. When I hear Google scream from the top of their lungs "innocent until proven guilty" and "burden of proof required" then I will believe they are doing enough. Maybe Google should change it's background color to black?
Until then, I fully support anyone who looks for alternatives.
This had very little to do with Google being `evil', the NSA, or any of that (despite the title, I realize now it's a bit misleading).
Rather, it has to do with me not keeping all of my services in the same basket and not being dependant on the integrations between services run by the same company. I would have happily switched my services to Microsoft or Amazon if they provided something better and am still happy to go back to Google for things that I can't find a good alternative too (I still search with Google on occasion, still use Google Books, Google Patent search, etc.)
Paper calendar suggestion seems kind of defeatist. I just switched to http://radicale.org/ (from my old nokia phone calendar, not from google) and it seems fine so far.
Nothing always works properly ("Perfect is the enemy of good").
A paper calendar and pencil simply doesn't scale if you need to share & sync calendar events with a team or group of people. Or simply want to keep your phone's datebook in sync with the one in your email client, etc.
It scales fine. In fact it scaled for hundreds of years before electronic calendars appeared. They mobilized two world wars with pens, paper and typewriters.
Synchronisation is not an issue if you have one single source of truth.
I get that you don't need a digital calendar. I've really not ever had that many issues syncing our team's calendars between mobile & desktop clients. Perhaps I've had good luck.
It seems your argument against a digital calendar holds for all the things you're seeking a non-Google replacement for. In light of that, do we really need email or blogs, or federated IM, for that matter? Write a letter instead.
Indeed. Paper calendars might have worked for WWI and WWII, but that took a lot of effort and was not instantaneous. I would also like to get up in the morning and not have to actively check the calendar to see what are my daily tasks -- rather, I would passively glance at my phone (or computer) and have it tell me what are my daily tasks. It's just less overhead to worry about, and freeing some brain cycles for whatever tasks you may have ahead. It's either lazy or efficient, whatever you prefer :)
I spent several years using outlook, apple ical and windows live calendar. I then ended up having to write a backend for icalendar protocol and saw what a shit crock everything is. It's a miracle any of it works.
Last year I moved back to a paper diary and a mechanical pencil. It is considerably more flexible, readable and editable. I hit several brick walls with computer based calendars particularly with having to add complex events like "every third Friday but not the 25th because I'm on holiday then".
Free form is sometimes better than structure.
Its like going from a relational database to a document store.
As for music I think that for Linux (I guess you probably use Linux since Windows is just as evil as Chrome or Facebook) XMMS is still the best player. I use it for years now and I never had problems with it. It also comes with a Winamp-like interface and functionality.
What difference would that make? They'd probably set up a big cable to transfer data from Europe to the States anyways.
Recently, I asked an email newsletter service provider in Germany (like Mailchimp) where they store all the people's email addresses. They use some Amazon service with company HQ in Ireland. However, does that guarantee me that Amazon doesn't transfer any of the data to US data centers?
As already mentioned above: their are probably not selling directly your information (in the sense of these days revelations), but they are selling their product because of your content. Simple network effect: the more people there are, the more valuable their application is, the more traction it gains toward new users, the more new users there are.
Making money through you. (Like all user-generated content websites)
That parently isn't the same as selling advertisers information. Nor is it the same as tracking and selling that to advertisers. It's entirely disingenuous to suggest so.
No, it's disingenuous to suggest YOUR content is unrelated to the value of THEIR product.
A reasonable analogy would be conferences, are you paying for the venue, or the access to other people/speakers? does that mean the people/speakers are the product?
My contribution being of value to the site is one thing. Tracking that contribution and using it to target advertising is a completely different thing. Suggesting otherwise, as you and others appear to be doing, is deliberately disingenuous.
If there is an transaction between the user and the company, i.e. data in exchange for service, I do find it a bit strange that the tax office has not started to extract sales tax on it.
Might be a bit evil/selfish, but I somewhat hope that services that user need to pay for with personal data gets taxed, just so that truly "free" services can get an competitive edge on the market.
Eventually (e.g. via targeted advertising) they convert that data to cash. If they weren't going to make cash from it, they would not be collecting it in the first place. And when they do convert it to cash, that cash will be taxed.
There are lots of companies that simply sell you the serive and at the same time profiteering on your data.
Unless, of course, privacy is part of that service, but even then the company isn't trustworth unless it actively encourages use of end-to-end encryption wherever feasible.
I think you missed the part where I said that it's not a guarantee.
Obviously, it's not a guarantee. They can still profit both ways. But if they have another means of profit, then there is the possibility that they're not dead set on profiteering on your data.
This is still not good enough for me though. Self-hosted or nothing as far as I'm concerned (Social Networks).
muyuu: Absolutely right (although, depending on the social network and how federation is handled they could possibly sell your data even if it's self hosted). If you know of any other good self-hosted social networks I'd love to hear about them. Feel free to email me; I may or may not see it in the deluge of comments here (see the about page on my blog).
Most people are ignoring the biggest problem that Google is causing. Gmail's virtual dominance in email field is going to be extremely hurtful for the rest of the hacker and startup community.
At the end of the email marketing remains the numero uno method of user acquisition and retention. With the new features such as priority inbox and automated classification of personal emails/promotion emails it is going to make it impossible for new consumer web startups to succeed.
sorry, no, i would be thrilled to have promotional email automatically separated from my personal email. it may make your job of user acquisition (isn't "user acquisition by email marketing" just a euphemism for spam?) and retention harder, but this is my inbox, not an extension of your ad campaign.
True. But the idea is that "you" should decide that and not google. For example google might chose to block 99% of the marketing emails which might make you happy but at the same time Google will decide which 1% of them will succeed.
If GMail kills email marketing, I will walk all the way around the world to Palo Alto and personally shake Larry & Sergey by the hand. Nobody likes email marketing, not even the people building their livelihoods on top of it.
If Google managed to snuff out such a widely reviled marketing channel, it would be an enormously disruptive force in the tech industry. And disruptive forces aren't hurtful for the startup community at all. Disruption makes room for innovation.
Sure, it'd be bad news for SendGrid, but it'd be awesome news for some lucky group of people in the 2015 YC batch.
Absolutely. As users we would all love if we get "no promotional" emails in our inbox. But this is going to give power to Google to decide which email get delivered and which does not giving an bias towards which company makes more money than others. Which is not good.
I would rather see a more distributed and open system that helps people get rid of the promotional emails or not.
There are many people who actually read the emails they receive from companies, even promotional emails. The fact is that not all email marketing is spam.
Some people like being informed about the products/services they use - in this case, the email marketing they opt into is a periodic newsletter of sorts. When a new feature or improvement is released, some people like receiving an email notifying them of the release. Again, such an email is marketing. For larger companies, there's a marketing team who designed the email and wrote the copy for it.
Don't confuse email marketing with spam. Some marketing is spam, much of it is not.
It's just semi-legitimate spam really. It's OK if you follow these rules:-
> Unsub is stupidly easy to find and use. No, I don't need to fill out your survey or login and use textboxes to complete.
> I signed up for it. The default on the signup page was no. There was clear seperation between boxes that had to be ticked and ones that didn't.
If you don't you lose the semi-legitimate and you're getting marked as spam.
After working for many years in email marketing let me tell you what I have learned. Giving a clear cut and well accessible working unsub link is the best way to ensure deliveribility.
i did this several years ago, feels good knowing that google has to work hard to spy on me versus me just giving them all kinds of info about myself via search, etc.
the only thing i use is a throwaway gmail address that is mostly a spam magnet.
Whenever I read such posts (moving everything off Google/FaceBook/...), whatever the rationale, I feel like I am living in a parallel universe.
All my friends are on Facebook and as much as I dislike Facebook's piracy invasion, it's an excellent tool to keep in touch with people.
I could drop Google Talk, but as much as federation is a good thing, ironically I wouldn't have many people to talk to, since they use Google Talk/Hangouts.
Perhaps a decentralised file sharing tool is better. But everyone is using Dropbox and Bittorrent Sync will be too outworldish for colleagues/family/friends.
Come on now, "everyone is using" may have something to it, but its also a marketing/mind-trick of keeping people locked in to these services.
I remember in 2004, 2005 when Gmail began, why would anyone use gmail, everyone is using hotmail (shared experience). Why would anyone begin using skype, everyone is using msn? Why would anyone begin using Facebook everyone is on MySpace?
Someone has to be the first, take the step. Its us geeks that have to take the lead, do it. Just imagine if 5% of hn people would all begin using alternative software, improving it in the process. Free software at its best. Just a dream?
Time to jump of the trainwreck of these "cloudy" "services".
People could start using gmail because emails work independently from the provider. If gmail provides the nicer user experience you lose nothing from switching.
People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students. They were friends in reallife already and Facebook made it easier to coordinate.
People started using Skype because it allowed calling real phones cheaply, msn doesn't.
A large fraction of HN readers probably use Linux and free software. A fraction of them probably even improves the software they use. That doesn't mean that the average person wants to switch too.
5 years from now, "People started to use seamless encryption and pseudo/anonymizing services and protocols because it was exclusive, cheap and safe."
You are right in pointing out that all the services we switched too, had some USP, I believe I2P, ownCloud, Citadel, Tor, gnunet, OTR/XMPP all have their USP too, and that is safety and freedom to express and say what ever the fuck comes to mind without self-censorship or fear for what consequences/blackmail it might have in the future.
I have a thing to not talk about the "average person" because it means too many things and more often than not is a patronizing way of saying idiots. But lets go with it this time, the average person has no incentive to use productive equipment like a PC at all and they are perfectly fine with a consume-only, digitally-rights-managed, locked-down, surveillance device. We hackers should just give up on them, let them eat cake. /rant.
> People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students.
Citation needed, from a different source than the FB founders.
It's a very juicy marketing lie to spread but I've seen social and IM networks of all types come and go and the only reason ever has always been "because my friends are there".
All the rest is just feature candy, stuff to attract the pioneer trend-setters. The great mass of people just herded there, couldn't care less about exclusivity or particular features (cause learning to use features is hard and exclusivity is scary), not until it was shoved in their faces.
The trend-setters don't care nearly as much about "my friends are already there", because if they did, they wouldn't be trend-setters.
So right now what I'm seeing that among those people who care about features, what is in demand but not currently available: decentralized and private (and on some level, not-Facebook, not-Google), and another important thing I keep hearing echoed but not quite emphasized are group chats (quite available already but it also seems to be a deal-breaker for new platforms if it's not there, just saying, in case anyone wants to build the next encrypted social messaging whatnot).
There also dont seem to be any safe/encrypted way to have a group chat with deniability, and not even a safe way to have audio and/or video communications that dont drop or lag randomly, are slow or require a programmer to setup. (Looking at you Jitsi).
Its a big problem, to get all this right, but whoever does it is doing humanity a great one. I propose to fund it by donations, not ads or subscriptions.
>People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students.
>Citation needed, from a different source than the FB founders.
Facebook was only limited to a number of higher education institutions for the first few years of its life. You needed to be a student at a college / university to get access as it wasn't open to the general public, and it took a couple years before it was widespread across all schools before going public. I was among that set of people who were able to use it.
I remember people started using gmail because it's the first free email that offer virtually unlimited space, so I don't have to keep deleting old emails like I did in Hotmail.
So you didn't have friends before Facebook and Google? :) I feel that people who put so much emphasis on Facebook live in a parallel universe, too.
Let's not forget these are just tools. Most of the relationship people have on Facebook are as shallow as they get because it's easy to shoot a message on such systems. But do you really care about EVERYONE you have in your networks ? Would you really miss something crucial in your life if you didn't have it ?
Before people used to bond because they had things in common (Usenet, IRC with specific topics of interest), the "new" social networks are just about gathering numbers and bonding with people you have just met once or twice in your life and with you have little in common. At least, that's how I see most people around me using Facebook.
I use FB to organize stuff in my local circle of friends, I use it to keep in contact with people who I met who went back to their home country, I use it for people I meet once a year when going to a festival so we can meet up again, I use it for people I might want to contact again (ordered into acquaintances so they don't show up on my newsfeed) and I think I have 3-6 people I've never met before, those are the ones that should have pages but use accounts ;)
Doing all that w/o facebook would be a giant PITA.
»Facebook and Twitter are not social networks, they are just platforms. _We_ are the social network.«
– Amr Gharbeia (https://twitter.com/gharbeia ), a few years ago at a conference, commenting on their activism in Egypt and coping with overload and unavailability of Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Also fully agree with your other points. I don’t use Facebook (Twitter though) and just email people whom I care about. Works fine, and those who really care have no problem with you not being on Facebook.
I've stopped using Facebook and behold - all my best friends are still here. If a friendship can't exist without Facebook, then they probably aren't your friend at all...
It's a bit different when friends are spread out all over the globe. If I want to message someone 13 hours away it is either Facebook or email, and facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.
But why? Why can't people use email anymore? This is a genuine question! I rarely feel like I would need something other than email for anything, so I don't understand how facebook replaced that?
Depending on your friends, facebook offers various advantages. You can see what they've been doing", see if they are online, send a simple 'hey' that wouldn't really be written if you were to use email.
People do use email still... But pretending facebook doesn't offer any value is an exercise in reality distortion.
FB gives you a great way to stay peripherally involved in people's lives. It allows you to have numerous but low-cost touch points such that when you next have a chance to properly catch-up you already know what the major events have been.
It's the complete opposite of email where I think "I'll wait until I have something proper to say" and then never send anything. On FB, it's totally normal to leave one-line comments. Having said this, I barely use FB anymore (due to privacy concerns).
Edit: I should also add that I've never used email in the social way that people seem to refer to. I really don't understand how that would be possible. FB allowed new types of social exchanges that didn't exist before (for me, at least).
I think I start to get it, thank you.
So facebook basically replaces blogs/microblogging and photo sharing websites? i.e. blogs for the passive or peripheral involvement.
Regarding your second point, mailing lists and group emails combined with personal emails are a good medium of social interaction IMO.
It's more like having RSS feeds in your reader for blogs that are rarely updated and you may have forgotten about (although not quite as you have to actively mark feeds as read).
An email (whether direct or via a mailing list) is an interruption (at least to me), whereas a Facebook post just drops off the bottom of the page if I ignore it.
EDIT: Sorry, that was poorly worded.
The discovery side of it is more like an RSS reader (or maybe a group email). But the key distinction (for me at least) is that I can be totally passive - I don't even need to mark things as read - or I can engage.
Moreoever, it's socially acceptable to be passive whereas ignoring an email (even a group email) is considered more like wilfully ignoring them (e.g cold-shoulder, blanking, etc)
Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter made texting social, etc.
10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts.
I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.
For me, it's not about the direct messaging - it's the feed.
Someone on the other side of the world posts a photo of something they've been doing, I comment on it and we have a conversation.
For this to happen without the likes of Facebook, they would have to explicitly share that photo with me, something that may or may not be likely depending upon what the photo is about, what their perception of my interests are and whether they think I want to be bothered with it.
They can, but they do not. Why send an email to each person, when you can just post baby pictures or what you are doing to everyone on your feed? Then you don't have to worry about missing someone.
You could just as well use an address book group to send email to everyone or to a specific group. But I worry much more about spamming people with stuff they're not interested in than missing someone.
Sharing on Facebook is a passive thing. You put a picture on your profile and your friends decide if it's worth their time to look at further. You never explicitly told them to look at it, you merely gave them the opportunity. It's like hanging a picture on the wall of your home.
Email is a very explicit share. You are telling someone to look at this, because you sent it to them. This is much more personal. There's a social stigma in over-emailing, as much as there is a social stigma in not reading the emails a friend sends you. Emailing pictures is more like calling a friend. Yeah it's nice to hear their voice directly, but what if they don't want to hear what you have to say at this moment?
Email has changed. I don't reply to every link or picture people send me, nor do I expect a reply on each and every email I send.
There are certainly different social assumptions between email and Facebook, but the differences have long started to blur, depending on what context we're talking about (e.g work vs friends, etc.)
I agree with fauigerzigerk. I would say that email can, at this point, be used to "bump" stuff, to inform people, etc. without commitment or expectancy of an answer. At least, that's the way I use it.
You can't email someone 13 hours away? [0] What difference does it make if they're spread out all over the globe or not, whether you can email or FB them?
I do get the idea, sometimes I feel a little bit excluded without an FB account, but I have never had the problem that somebody didn't have an email address. Not even kids.
People seem to make up all sorts of excuses, but in the end it always boils down to 1) suffering minor inconveniences and 2) the (often[1] irrational) fear of social exile.
As other people have pointed out, changing networks is not that hard. It's a false belief that it is. Years ago my local friends were mostly on MSN[2], East European/Middle East folks were on ICQ and Y!C, US people were using AIM. So I used Trillian and later Pidgin. What you saw was this, people are moving around all the time, and many of the persons were 2 or 3x in my contact list because they too were on multiple networks. Google chat just sort of edged itself in there as well.
Think of it like this, remember how easy it was to find all your friends on FB because of that network? And didn't the same happen with email, and with AIM/MSN/iCQ/etc? I see friends and acquaintances trickle in on G+ without any effort for that reason (except I don't want to use G+ either). Now FB pushes its "help" quite aggressively, but even without that, people connect in networks, point eachother to their friends, it's very peer-to-peer :)
[1] note I'm not saying "always", I can imagine certain high school scenarios where this fear might be somewhat real, although one has to wonder ...
[2] unfortunately I lost my MSN acct because the not-hotmail domain I registered it to expired a long long time ago and it stopped working--if anyone knows a solution to that I'd love to hear it because I would love to see that old contact list back :) (however I could also reg a new account and repopulate my contacts via-via just as easy)
I don't agree with this. I have had friends spread all over the globe and we still managed to have a call once a week and text regularly. Facebook does nothing to promote or enhance true friendships, it is social lip gloss at best. Yet too many people are to unfilled and shallow to truly see it.
Not really. My friends are spread out all over the globe. I do not use Facebook. I still manage to email and IM them without any headaches or complaints.
Here's the thing. My friends and I use Facebook to organise evenings out and other outings. We have one friend that refuses to use Facebook, so now we post an event in Facebook, and then someone has to go to the effort of keeping the outcast informed. It's actually quite a pain for your friends if you refuse to use the tool that they are using to organise themselves. It makes your friends do extra work to accomodate you...
I know this not the crux of your post, but have you tried turning off email notifications from Facebook? I did sometime ago and I haven't gotten an email from them in years. Moving Facebook notifications out of my inbox and into a space that I had to explicitly poll went a long way towards reducing how annoying FB could be.
1) Facebook do not sell your information to advertisers.
2) The emails are pretty easy to remove - case in point, I stopped them sending me emails in 2009, and have not received one since. Linkedin on the other hand, go straight into spam because they just won't stop sending me mails...
First thing I did was disable all email notifications. Not a trivial task: I had to turn off like 30 different types of notifications one by one. However, these sly bastards just kept coming up with new notifications, that were turned on by default. So I kept getting emails from facebook, even though I thought I had disabled all of them.
That was my experience a year or two ago. At some point I deleted my facebook account, because the value I got out of it wasn't sufficient to tolerate all those annoyances: changing email notifications, constantly changing privacy settings and policies, annoying ads, annoying messages from people I barely know...
I got rid of everything a few years back. The only thing they introduced was the mentions, and i disabled that a few weeks ago (after my friends learned about it). I didn't have the same experience, to be honest. I found Linkedin much more difficult.
Mind you, the constantly shifting privacy settings are weird, its easy to be really granular (go to your Activity Log) but it is effort. You can also change privacy on a post by post basis, but its sticky, so you need to be careful. The ads never really bothered me (except for the dating ones just after i came out of a long term relationship). In fact, I never ad-blocked facebook because I could x out of ads I didn't want to see. The annoying messages from people is not really Facebook's fault, though I feel your pain....
It's you and your friends who decided to make him an outcast by forcing him to choose to stay in a particular closed site when there are so many open options to organise meet-ups, including simply firing an email with CC/BCC to all parties.
Even now there are still simpletons who don't understand the reasoning of those deciding to stay away of these sites. I'm saying just understanding it, not necessarily agreeing to it.
You make it sound like this is the fault of the person who is not on Facebook, as opposed to the fault of the people who chose to use a system that has zero interoperability with other systems. From where I sit, the problem is you for choosing to use a closed system to organize social events. The problem is you for allowing Facebook to control your social life in this fashion.
Making someone into an outcast because they do not use your favorite social networking system is the problem here.
After quitting facebook I realized that my true friends would still be my friends. Two months have passed and (in my case anyway) I feel like I am building better friendships with my friends because of using email/sms/voice calls more often instead of facebook.
>> Do you really have to keep in touch with people seeing what they did on their vacations, bs inspirational quotes and baby photos?
You may mock, but keeping involved in the minutiae of each others' lives does enable the maintenance of friendships over longer distance and time spans. Minutiae that we wouldn't necessarily make the effort to email or chat about.
As I get older my friends (and myself) have dispersed all over the globe, and even the ones not so far off have less time to give (and possibly less inclination) to spend time just hanging out.
That said, it doesn't have to be FB, or a centralised service at all.
Out of sight out of mind I guess. It doesn't really bother me that I fall out of daily touch with friends far away. A couple times a year I'll sit down and write them a letter (..email).
It's worth remembering how so many came to use these services in the first place – as a tech 'front liner' I too was once guilty of unconditionally mocking others and saying "you should be on Gmail!".
Now the tech front is reversing its position, and hopefully the rest of society will eventually follow. Unfortunately the scene isn't set just now, because there simply aren't good alternatives to Gmail – nothing free or self hosted comes remotely close to its clean UI.
When such a thing exists, selling regular users on moving away from Google will be a much easier proposition
[If you're reading this and thinking of cloning Gmail – for fuck's sake don't waste your time "innovating" on the UI and getting it horribly wrong! (This was really the biggest tragedy of the Reader transition). Do a pixel perfect conversion. Except for artwork, cloning a UI is perfectly legal as demonstrated by case law going back 20+ years in the EU and USA.]
I agree that everyone uses Facebook, but for Google products other than search uses seems much more scattered. I personally know only techies on Google Talk/Hangouts, no "regular people", and many of those techies are thinking of moving away from it. The "regular people" I know all use Skype, with a minority using AIM for text-chat. Skype would be harder for me to drop (unfortunately, because the client is incredibly annoying), but Google Talk is easy.
mjn: That's actually suprising to me; among my friends most of the non-techi people use Google Talk (a few on AIM and Skype as well, but not many). Most of my techi friends used Google Talk as well but started moving away after federation was killed off. Now many of them use a mix of other XMPP providers (DuckDuckGo, Jabber.org both being popular) and direct messaging on IRC.
I am not on Facebook because I feel that they are an untrustworthy company. That said, if I felt I needed it, I would have to set up a web browser dedicated to it, or always be in Incognito mode while using it.
All good suggestions, but heavily focused on non-collaborative solutions. For example a paper calendar is no good if you regularly use your colleagues calendars to schedule events and know what is going on.
Well, people have been living with paper calendars for dozens of years and were still able to launch rockets and stuff. I think we overestimate the usefulness of some digital tools. Making it easy to schedule meetings often results in tons of unnecessary meetings - it's better to have some friction there. But I guess it really depends what you do - there are certain use cases for digital calendars, but in my experience the way they are used is unproductive.
I hate working with people who send me a note after they've already sent me a meeting request, telling me that they saw an opening on my calendar and have set up an hour-long meeting with no agenda.
It's a weird combination of laziness and an unwillingness to use other tools (email, issue tracking, typing). If they just typed up an agenda (heck, Confluence has a template ready) we could probably wrap up the whole thing while I'm goofing around on HN.
Having to go through an EA/PA to schedule meetings is one of the best ways of exchanging money for time, plus you end up having one person who never makes you cringe, unless you start worrying that they're giving notice because they're starting their own company or moving across the country.
Thanks for the Photographer.io mention! I was about to deploy Dutch and Polish language support when I noticed the traffic rolling in, so I'll be leaving that for a few hours now in case I break it.
If anyone has any questions about privacy on Photographer.io or any other general questions then I'd be happy to answer. You can also email them over to support@photographer.io if you prefer.
I'm going to give it a try. I tried 500px but something about it seemed off. I use instagram and just started with flickr.
I have an old site that turned folders of photos into table based galleries which I coded up last century....
PGP and S/MIME work perfectly well. Personally, I'd be wary of any new crypto solution until it had been extensively independantly verified and burned in for several years.
Can we stop with the circlejerk hating on Google now? They didn't close down services that we didn't see coming. Reader could have been predicted a long time ago - the service was not updated for well over a year before they announced it's demise and the death of XMPP is simply because Google was pushing forward with their own services.
Companies have to make money. Google's always been in it for the money. Microsoft could shut off any of their services at any time. So could Dropbox or your favorite news site. Stop complaining and joining the circlejerk, think for yourself.
As I mentiond, I'm certainly not a `Google hater.' I just don't want all of my services in one basket because I want ot be less dependant on one provider and the integrations between their services.
Am I the only one who want the opposite? I love having everything seamlessly tied to one ecosystem. The synergy effects are worth it and I can't see a better company than Google to handle it.
No, you're clearly in the majority of people who value their own convenience highly. I unfortunately have to include myself in that majority too, although less enthusiastically than you.
> The synergy effects are worth it
To you as an individual maybe. Overall the prospect of a populace whose information and activities are all stored and logged by a small number of entities is a pretty big "it", and I don't think the (admittedly great) personal convenience is worth it.
Edit: It occurs to me that your use of the word "ecosystem" is a bit weird. Really, what you're saying is akin to saying you like the advantages of a monoculture.
Everything being seamless is great for usability. But they also place you at great risk. For example if Google disable your account you lose all access. Similarly you are at their mercy for what happens in the future (eg cancelling services, requiring you to use others in certain ways, platform support). It also means that you aren't using best of breed for various parts of the solution. For some it may not matter (maybe you don't care about photos, or files, or calendars, or address books or mobile apps or group chat).
As an end user it is in your best long term interests to have open solutions. That means protocols with multiple implementations of the client and server ends. It means identity, authorization and exposure under your control. And it also means freedom for others to write new clients and servers.
> It also means that you aren't using best of breed for various parts of the solution.
This author admits Chrome is better. Google cannot disable his access to Chrome. If it's cancelled, then IT IS open source, and someone can run with it and make a new project (much like Cyanogen). If in the future it requires you to use other products in certain ways, then it IS open source.
There is literally no reason to not use Chrome, other than spite.
If someone else prefers another browser, that's fine. But none of the stated rationale explain why the author abandoned it.
"in the interest of free as in freedom software". Can you make any sense of that?
They can disable access to some of the functionality - for example bookmarks, password sync, what tabs you had open etc. Suddenly having a "naked" browser without any of that could be disconcerting and problematic.
My bigger point was that if you use Google (or anyone else) for 15 different things then all 15 won't be best of breed. (Obviously some could be.) Putting all your eggs in one basket means getting less than the best for some of those 15, likely the majority.
Using open solutions means you can use the best for you.
> ... free as in freedom ...
It was as a contrast to "open". For example it is possible to have open protocols, but implementing them requires licensing fees, or dealing with patents, or paying for certification. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and apply it to software running on either end of open protocols.
I liked to have one ecosystem as well, but not anymore - it's too risky, because then one company has too much of your data, and there are too many various possibilities how the data can be leaked.
I now use the opposite strategy, having several various providers, preferably not free, while one company provides only one service, i.e. one for bookmarks, another one for email, etc. I found that I don't miss the synergy effect as much as I thought.
It seems like the majority wants that, and that's very understandable. But it's very very hard to know what "it" actually is, especially when you try to account for the future. So, I don't think most people have the smallest clue if this is a good trade-off or not. Time will tell I guess..
Another point that actually bothers me more is how inflexible this is. You can't mix & match the best services when sticking to one ecosystem. And you cant take part of new development happening elsewhere. So you're actually missing out on all the cool stuff happening elsewhere, and the longer you use these services the harder it is to switch to something else.
They're a huge multi-national corporation. It's unlikely they have your long term interests, goals, safety, personal satisfaction in mind. But yes, it's convenient and a lot of people agree with you at the moment.
My guess is more will come out, and people will see that trusting private corporations with private data isn't a great idea.
Another cloud file storage service worth checking out is Jottacloud (http://www.jottacloud.com). It has similar features to Google Drive and Dropbox but being based in Norway, it complies with stricter laws on privacy and data ownership. See for example the question "What does it mean for me that my files are stored in Norway?" in their FAQ (http://www.jottacloud.com/faq/).
It seems like a good option. Relatively cheap as well. But are they encrypting my files? On the FAQ page they say that during uploading the data transfer is encrypted, but they don't mention if my files stay encrypted on their server.
There's something sketchy about Jottacloud. I don't trust it. I installed the client a few weeks ago and it wouldn't upload my files. The program just froze. When I tried to uninstall the software it hung again (I had to manually delete it).
It's still in my start menu somehow, although I disabled it. And this is happening to a guy who religiously scans and cleans his Windows partition.
A similar service is Wuala (https://www.wuala.com/), which is owned by the French company LaCie.
They say your files are encrypted using AES-256 before they leave your system and the key stays with you. Apparently the only thing their employees see is the number of your files and their size.
Their servers are in Switzerland, France and Germany.
I get the point of moving other services to places that are encrypted, private, secure, and cannot be reached by NSA, GCHQ, etc.
But... email?
It goes over the internet in plain text, has substantial meta-data, and even the contents are trivially small to store.
When people want to come off of G+, Facebook, etc... great, that makes some sense. If they want to stop using Chrome Sync, and to use Firefox, install add blockers, anti-trackers, change their hosts file, use VPNs, enable Tor, change DNS provider... great, that makes some sense.
Email makes a lot less sense though. It's effectively public and what security exists is about effective as your front door lock. It keeps out the average person that passes by and little more than that.
There is actually some argument to be had that if most of your contacts use Gmail that you should stay on Gmail as the email wouldn't route via the public internet.
I am sticking with Gmail, but am using a Google Apps for Domains account for it as that allows you to configure the domain to fully disable other Google and related services (G+, YouTube, advertising, Drive, etc). I then access Gmail via Chrome Incognito and live the rest of my internet life in Firefox.
Effectively Google for me, starts each day afresh, sand-boxed in a private browser session, and with no permission to do anything else.
The only other Google things I used they have already shuttered or have announced they're doing so. Effectively when this happens I am one of the n% who don't move to G+ and roll off of Google services.
I do wonder if we'll ever hear what % of users didn't go to Hangouts when they re-branded and closed Talk. What % of Latitude users will vanish when G+ gets whatever location sharing capability. Maybe it's negligible to Google, but it doesn't feel negligible when I speak to friends who used to use Google a lot more.
Oh I realise, but the title suggested otherwise (and not everyone RTFA, though I did).
I was actually replying to others in this discussion who advocated "move your email too".
I originally composed the above as a reply to one of those, realised I was replying to several (4 at this point) other replies, and figured I'd make the point more generally that moving email provider achieves little.
You can use a TLS connection to the local email server. You can even enforce that a mail server you run uses TLS to the destination MX. There's no way of forcing that an email will use a secure connection for it's entire journey.
Did you read the post? He does not mention NSA or security as one of the reason to get off the Google services. Not one bit.
"The recent Google Reader shutdown and Google Hangouts disabling XMPP federation made me realize that any of my services could go at any time and I didn’t want to be so dependant on a single provider or the integrations between services."
He also said he had stopped using Google search, which is entirely inconsistent with his "could go at any time" reasoning. Clearly there must be something else that motivates his actions.
Yes, but only because setting up proper encryption in email is a pain (but it isn't impossible). Email makes the most sense to move off centralised services if privacy/security of your data is one of your aims.
Edit: Though to be fair to the OP, that's not the threat model he's tackling. It's more the potential for service shutdown or lockout (which I think is low risk in the case of Gmail).
I had an idea for a small SMTP/IMAP proxy, running on your own server, that connected to your actual IMAP account and called GPG to encrypt/decrypt your mail. That way, everything would be end-to-end encrypted, if your correspondent used GPG/the proxy as well. It would even be completely transparent to you and all your devices.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadGMail is excellent at search and spam filtering, everything else is just a standard e-mail service. The tutorial points out how you can at least try and match the level of spam filtering with the community based Pyzor.
I wrote about how I use Google-alternatives here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718126 An addendum to that, since the article mentioned Music and OwnCloud: I use Subsonic to stream my music collection, the Android app is very nice in how it caches so I always feel like I have full access to my complete collection without getting huge mobile data bills; I don't think OwnCloud's music app can match Subsonic quite yet.
* We’re reworking the Music app this summer, see http://kabum.github.io/2013/06/20/GSoC-First-report/
* There is a stable News app to read RSS feeds: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=580
Cheers!
Personal email would be the most important service to get under your own control, and it's the hardest of all problems to solve.
If the service is good enough, then why bother switching providers? At the end of the day all businesses want to profit . Also, it's a matter of personal preference - Some like Gmail and some like Hotmail. But moving away from a really good provider because it doesn't provide a 'feature X' (unless it impacts you in anyway and makes it unusable) then I see no point in moving away at all.
I'm all for alternatives (especially open source and non-US based alternatives), but if Google is still the most convenient service provider at the moment, I'll continue using them.
Corporations don't deserve a second chance either.
If you have time: https://medium.com/surveillance-state/32ba2b38c219 - this is part of an overall move towards 'a bit more evil' than the general public is aware of.
Rather, it has to do with me not keeping all of my services in the same basket and not being dependant on the integrations between services run by the same company. I would have happily switched my services to Microsoft or Amazon if they provided something better and am still happy to go back to Google for things that I can't find a good alternative too (I still search with Google on occasion, still use Google Books, Google Patent search, etc.)
I'd rather have neither than any that aren't trustworthy.
A paper calendar and pencil simply doesn't scale if you need to share & sync calendar events with a team or group of people. Or simply want to keep your phone's datebook in sync with the one in your email client, etc.
It scales fine. In fact it scaled for hundreds of years before electronic calendars appeared. They mobilized two world wars with pens, paper and typewriters.
Synchronisation is not an issue if you have one single source of truth.
It seems your argument against a digital calendar holds for all the things you're seeking a non-Google replacement for. In light of that, do we really need email or blogs, or federated IM, for that matter? Write a letter instead.
Last year I moved back to a paper diary and a mechanical pencil. It is considerably more flexible, readable and editable. I hit several brick walls with computer based calendars particularly with having to add complex events like "every third Friday but not the 25th because I'm on holiday then".
Free form is sometimes better than structure.
Its like going from a relational database to a document store.
For example, if you want to be reminded every third Friday of the month, except on 19th of July because you're on holiday, you can write:
Now you ask it to print the events for the next six months: As you see, it skipped "My Event" on the July 19th, because it was an Holiday.[1]: http://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind
Plus I have to have a network connection and log into a UNIX box for it which I can't do whilst I'm on the phone as it's stuck to my head at the time.
Moving from one to another is never wasting the time.
Recently, I asked an email newsletter service provider in Germany (like Mailchimp) where they store all the people's email addresses. They use some Amazon service with company HQ in Ireland. However, does that guarantee me that Amazon doesn't transfer any of the data to US data centers?
Wrong, you're still a product. The "consumer vs. product" dilemma is a false one.
"We are selling our product, NOT our users.
We will never sell your personal data, content, feed, interests, clicks, or anything else to advertisers. We promise."
Which means they are just lying in their about page.
Making money through you. (Like all user-generated content websites)
A reasonable analogy would be conferences, are you paying for the venue, or the access to other people/speakers? does that mean the people/speakers are the product?
You are not being "sold". That entire line of thinking is intellectually lazy and meant to provoke an emotional response. I wish people would stop it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Might be a bit evil/selfish, but I somewhat hope that services that user need to pay for with personal data gets taxed, just so that truly "free" services can get an competitive edge on the market.
Obviously it's still not a guarantee.
There are lots of companies that simply sell you the serive and at the same time profiteering on your data.
Unless, of course, privacy is part of that service, but even then the company isn't trustworth unless it actively encourages use of end-to-end encryption wherever feasible.
Obviously, it's not a guarantee. They can still profit both ways. But if they have another means of profit, then there is the possibility that they're not dead set on profiteering on your data.
This is still not good enough for me though. Self-hosted or nothing as far as I'm concerned (Social Networks).
At StartHQ we provide a list of automatically generated alternatives, in case anyone wants to give it a go: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=google
- Google Voice
- Google Contacts
- SugarSync
- Otixo
- Dropbox
Not very helpful.
In the meantime, you can find all the Reader alternatives just by searching: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader
At the end of the email marketing remains the numero uno method of user acquisition and retention. With the new features such as priority inbox and automated classification of personal emails/promotion emails it is going to make it impossible for new consumer web startups to succeed.
Times will change again.
If Google managed to snuff out such a widely reviled marketing channel, it would be an enormously disruptive force in the tech industry. And disruptive forces aren't hurtful for the startup community at all. Disruption makes room for innovation.
Sure, it'd be bad news for SendGrid, but it'd be awesome news for some lucky group of people in the 2015 YC batch.
I would rather see a more distributed and open system that helps people get rid of the promotional emails or not.
Some people like being informed about the products/services they use - in this case, the email marketing they opt into is a periodic newsletter of sorts. When a new feature or improvement is released, some people like receiving an email notifying them of the release. Again, such an email is marketing. For larger companies, there's a marketing team who designed the email and wrote the copy for it.
Don't confuse email marketing with spam. Some marketing is spam, much of it is not.
> Unsub is stupidly easy to find and use. No, I don't need to fill out your survey or login and use textboxes to complete. > I signed up for it. The default on the signup page was no. There was clear seperation between boxes that had to be ticked and ones that didn't.
If you don't you lose the semi-legitimate and you're getting marked as spam.
the only thing i use is a throwaway gmail address that is mostly a spam magnet.
All my friends are on Facebook and as much as I dislike Facebook's piracy invasion, it's an excellent tool to keep in touch with people.
I could drop Google Talk, but as much as federation is a good thing, ironically I wouldn't have many people to talk to, since they use Google Talk/Hangouts.
Perhaps a decentralised file sharing tool is better. But everyone is using Dropbox and Bittorrent Sync will be too outworldish for colleagues/family/friends.
I remember in 2004, 2005 when Gmail began, why would anyone use gmail, everyone is using hotmail (shared experience). Why would anyone begin using skype, everyone is using msn? Why would anyone begin using Facebook everyone is on MySpace?
Someone has to be the first, take the step. Its us geeks that have to take the lead, do it. Just imagine if 5% of hn people would all begin using alternative software, improving it in the process. Free software at its best. Just a dream?
Time to jump of the trainwreck of these "cloudy" "services".
People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students. They were friends in reallife already and Facebook made it easier to coordinate.
People started using Skype because it allowed calling real phones cheaply, msn doesn't.
A large fraction of HN readers probably use Linux and free software. A fraction of them probably even improves the software they use. That doesn't mean that the average person wants to switch too.
You are right in pointing out that all the services we switched too, had some USP, I believe I2P, ownCloud, Citadel, Tor, gnunet, OTR/XMPP all have their USP too, and that is safety and freedom to express and say what ever the fuck comes to mind without self-censorship or fear for what consequences/blackmail it might have in the future.
I have a thing to not talk about the "average person" because it means too many things and more often than not is a patronizing way of saying idiots. But lets go with it this time, the average person has no incentive to use productive equipment like a PC at all and they are perfectly fine with a consume-only, digitally-rights-managed, locked-down, surveillance device. We hackers should just give up on them, let them eat cake. /rant.
Citation needed, from a different source than the FB founders.
It's a very juicy marketing lie to spread but I've seen social and IM networks of all types come and go and the only reason ever has always been "because my friends are there".
All the rest is just feature candy, stuff to attract the pioneer trend-setters. The great mass of people just herded there, couldn't care less about exclusivity or particular features (cause learning to use features is hard and exclusivity is scary), not until it was shoved in their faces.
The trend-setters don't care nearly as much about "my friends are already there", because if they did, they wouldn't be trend-setters.
So right now what I'm seeing that among those people who care about features, what is in demand but not currently available: decentralized and private (and on some level, not-Facebook, not-Google), and another important thing I keep hearing echoed but not quite emphasized are group chats (quite available already but it also seems to be a deal-breaker for new platforms if it's not there, just saying, in case anyone wants to build the next encrypted social messaging whatnot).
Its a big problem, to get all this right, but whoever does it is doing humanity a great one. I propose to fund it by donations, not ads or subscriptions.
>Citation needed, from a different source than the FB founders.
Facebook was only limited to a number of higher education institutions for the first few years of its life. You needed to be a student at a college / university to get access as it wasn't open to the general public, and it took a couple years before it was widespread across all schools before going public. I was among that set of people who were able to use it.
Let's not forget these are just tools. Most of the relationship people have on Facebook are as shallow as they get because it's easy to shoot a message on such systems. But do you really care about EVERYONE you have in your networks ? Would you really miss something crucial in your life if you didn't have it ?
Before people used to bond because they had things in common (Usenet, IRC with specific topics of interest), the "new" social networks are just about gathering numbers and bonding with people you have just met once or twice in your life and with you have little in common. At least, that's how I see most people around me using Facebook.
Doing all that w/o facebook would be a giant PITA.
– Amr Gharbeia (https://twitter.com/gharbeia ), a few years ago at a conference, commenting on their activism in Egypt and coping with overload and unavailability of Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Also fully agree with your other points. I don’t use Facebook (Twitter though) and just email people whom I care about. Works fine, and those who really care have no problem with you not being on Facebook.
People do use email still... But pretending facebook doesn't offer any value is an exercise in reality distortion.
It's the complete opposite of email where I think "I'll wait until I have something proper to say" and then never send anything. On FB, it's totally normal to leave one-line comments. Having said this, I barely use FB anymore (due to privacy concerns).
Edit: I should also add that I've never used email in the social way that people seem to refer to. I really don't understand how that would be possible. FB allowed new types of social exchanges that didn't exist before (for me, at least).
An email (whether direct or via a mailing list) is an interruption (at least to me), whereas a Facebook post just drops off the bottom of the page if I ignore it.
EDIT: Sorry, that was poorly worded.
The discovery side of it is more like an RSS reader (or maybe a group email). But the key distinction (for me at least) is that I can be totally passive - I don't even need to mark things as read - or I can engage.
10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts.
I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.
Someone on the other side of the world posts a photo of something they've been doing, I comment on it and we have a conversation.
For this to happen without the likes of Facebook, they would have to explicitly share that photo with me, something that may or may not be likely depending upon what the photo is about, what their perception of my interests are and whether they think I want to be bothered with it.
Email is a very explicit share. You are telling someone to look at this, because you sent it to them. This is much more personal. There's a social stigma in over-emailing, as much as there is a social stigma in not reading the emails a friend sends you. Emailing pictures is more like calling a friend. Yeah it's nice to hear their voice directly, but what if they don't want to hear what you have to say at this moment?
There are certainly different social assumptions between email and Facebook, but the differences have long started to blur, depending on what context we're talking about (e.g work vs friends, etc.)
I do get the idea, sometimes I feel a little bit excluded without an FB account, but I have never had the problem that somebody didn't have an email address. Not even kids.
People seem to make up all sorts of excuses, but in the end it always boils down to 1) suffering minor inconveniences and 2) the (often[1] irrational) fear of social exile.
As other people have pointed out, changing networks is not that hard. It's a false belief that it is. Years ago my local friends were mostly on MSN[2], East European/Middle East folks were on ICQ and Y!C, US people were using AIM. So I used Trillian and later Pidgin. What you saw was this, people are moving around all the time, and many of the persons were 2 or 3x in my contact list because they too were on multiple networks. Google chat just sort of edged itself in there as well.
Think of it like this, remember how easy it was to find all your friends on FB because of that network? And didn't the same happen with email, and with AIM/MSN/iCQ/etc? I see friends and acquaintances trickle in on G+ without any effort for that reason (except I don't want to use G+ either). Now FB pushes its "help" quite aggressively, but even without that, people connect in networks, point eachother to their friends, it's very peer-to-peer :)
[0] I mean, it happens ... http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
[1] note I'm not saying "always", I can imagine certain high school scenarios where this fear might be somewhat real, although one has to wonder ...
[2] unfortunately I lost my MSN acct because the not-hotmail domain I registered it to expired a long long time ago and it stopped working--if anyone knows a solution to that I'd love to hear it because I would love to see that old contact list back :) (however I could also reg a new account and repopulate my contacts via-via just as easy)
>facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.
I don't get why it's necessary to justify not using such a "tool".
That was my experience a year or two ago. At some point I deleted my facebook account, because the value I got out of it wasn't sufficient to tolerate all those annoyances: changing email notifications, constantly changing privacy settings and policies, annoying ads, annoying messages from people I barely know...
Mind you, the constantly shifting privacy settings are weird, its easy to be really granular (go to your Activity Log) but it is effort. You can also change privacy on a post by post basis, but its sticky, so you need to be careful. The ads never really bothered me (except for the dating ones just after i came out of a long term relationship). In fact, I never ad-blocked facebook because I could x out of ads I didn't want to see. The annoying messages from people is not really Facebook's fault, though I feel your pain....
Even now there are still simpletons who don't understand the reasoning of those deciding to stay away of these sites. I'm saying just understanding it, not necessarily agreeing to it.
Making someone into an outcast because they do not use your favorite social networking system is the problem here.
Ever tried mail and the ocassional phone call or meeting?
Do you really have to keep in touch with people seeing what they did on their vacations, bs inspirational quotes and baby photos?
You may mock, but keeping involved in the minutiae of each others' lives does enable the maintenance of friendships over longer distance and time spans. Minutiae that we wouldn't necessarily make the effort to email or chat about.
As I get older my friends (and myself) have dispersed all over the globe, and even the ones not so far off have less time to give (and possibly less inclination) to spend time just hanging out.
That said, it doesn't have to be FB, or a centralised service at all.
Now the tech front is reversing its position, and hopefully the rest of society will eventually follow. Unfortunately the scene isn't set just now, because there simply aren't good alternatives to Gmail – nothing free or self hosted comes remotely close to its clean UI.
When such a thing exists, selling regular users on moving away from Google will be a much easier proposition
[If you're reading this and thinking of cloning Gmail – for fuck's sake don't waste your time "innovating" on the UI and getting it horribly wrong! (This was really the biggest tragedy of the Reader transition). Do a pixel perfect conversion. Except for artwork, cloning a UI is perfectly legal as demonstrated by case law going back 20+ years in the EU and USA.]
It's a weird combination of laziness and an unwillingness to use other tools (email, issue tracking, typing). If they just typed up an agenda (heck, Confluence has a template ready) we could probably wrap up the whole thing while I'm goofing around on HN.
Having to go through an EA/PA to schedule meetings is one of the best ways of exchanging money for time, plus you end up having one person who never makes you cringe, unless you start worrying that they're giving notice because they're starting their own company or moving across the country.
If anyone has any questions about privacy on Photographer.io or any other general questions then I'd be happy to answer. You can also email them over to support@photographer.io if you prefer.
Companies have to make money. Google's always been in it for the money. Microsoft could shut off any of their services at any time. So could Dropbox or your favorite news site. Stop complaining and joining the circlejerk, think for yourself.
Google hasn't exactly been a good company recently, at the very least the whole reader issue has caused a lot of worry.
No, you're clearly in the majority of people who value their own convenience highly. I unfortunately have to include myself in that majority too, although less enthusiastically than you.
> The synergy effects are worth it
To you as an individual maybe. Overall the prospect of a populace whose information and activities are all stored and logged by a small number of entities is a pretty big "it", and I don't think the (admittedly great) personal convenience is worth it.
Edit: It occurs to me that your use of the word "ecosystem" is a bit weird. Really, what you're saying is akin to saying you like the advantages of a monoculture.
As an end user it is in your best long term interests to have open solutions. That means protocols with multiple implementations of the client and server ends. It means identity, authorization and exposure under your control. And it also means freedom for others to write new clients and servers.
This author admits Chrome is better. Google cannot disable his access to Chrome. If it's cancelled, then IT IS open source, and someone can run with it and make a new project (much like Cyanogen). If in the future it requires you to use other products in certain ways, then it IS open source.
There is literally no reason to not use Chrome, other than spite.
If someone else prefers another browser, that's fine. But none of the stated rationale explain why the author abandoned it.
"in the interest of free as in freedom software". Can you make any sense of that?
They can disable access to some of the functionality - for example bookmarks, password sync, what tabs you had open etc. Suddenly having a "naked" browser without any of that could be disconcerting and problematic.
My bigger point was that if you use Google (or anyone else) for 15 different things then all 15 won't be best of breed. (Obviously some could be.) Putting all your eggs in one basket means getting less than the best for some of those 15, likely the majority.
Using open solutions means you can use the best for you.
> ... free as in freedom ...
It was as a contrast to "open". For example it is possible to have open protocols, but implementing them requires licensing fees, or dealing with patents, or paying for certification. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and apply it to software running on either end of open protocols.
I now use the opposite strategy, having several various providers, preferably not free, while one company provides only one service, i.e. one for bookmarks, another one for email, etc. I found that I don't miss the synergy effect as much as I thought.
Another point that actually bothers me more is how inflexible this is. You can't mix & match the best services when sticking to one ecosystem. And you cant take part of new development happening elsewhere. So you're actually missing out on all the cool stuff happening elsewhere, and the longer you use these services the harder it is to switch to something else.
My guess is more will come out, and people will see that trusting private corporations with private data isn't a great idea.
It's still in my start menu somehow, although I disabled it. And this is happening to a guy who religiously scans and cleans his Windows partition.
I recommend everyone stay away.
But... email?
It goes over the internet in plain text, has substantial meta-data, and even the contents are trivially small to store.
When people want to come off of G+, Facebook, etc... great, that makes some sense. If they want to stop using Chrome Sync, and to use Firefox, install add blockers, anti-trackers, change their hosts file, use VPNs, enable Tor, change DNS provider... great, that makes some sense.
Email makes a lot less sense though. It's effectively public and what security exists is about effective as your front door lock. It keeps out the average person that passes by and little more than that.
There is actually some argument to be had that if most of your contacts use Gmail that you should stay on Gmail as the email wouldn't route via the public internet.
I am sticking with Gmail, but am using a Google Apps for Domains account for it as that allows you to configure the domain to fully disable other Google and related services (G+, YouTube, advertising, Drive, etc). I then access Gmail via Chrome Incognito and live the rest of my internet life in Firefox.
Effectively Google for me, starts each day afresh, sand-boxed in a private browser session, and with no permission to do anything else.
The only other Google things I used they have already shuttered or have announced they're doing so. Effectively when this happens I am one of the n% who don't move to G+ and roll off of Google services.
I do wonder if we'll ever hear what % of users didn't go to Hangouts when they re-branded and closed Talk. What % of Latitude users will vanish when G+ gets whatever location sharing capability. Maybe it's negligible to Google, but it doesn't feel negligible when I speak to friends who used to use Google a lot more.
I was actually replying to others in this discussion who advocated "move your email too".
I originally composed the above as a reply to one of those, realised I was replying to several (4 at this point) other replies, and figured I'd make the point more generally that moving email provider achieves little.
I'm not saying that is what's happening, just saying it makes it easier.
I don't know the penetration of TLS in SMTP servers, tried some google-fu but I didn't find anything interesting.
EDIT: chances are I misread your comment but still I really wonder how popular TLS is.
"The recent Google Reader shutdown and Google Hangouts disabling XMPP federation made me realize that any of my services could go at any time and I didn’t want to be so dependant on a single provider or the integrations between services."
Yes, but only because setting up proper encryption in email is a pain (but it isn't impossible). Email makes the most sense to move off centralised services if privacy/security of your data is one of your aims.
Edit: Though to be fair to the OP, that's not the threat model he's tackling. It's more the potential for service shutdown or lockout (which I think is low risk in the case of Gmail).
You can sign up for a free App.net account with an invite. I have a few, anyone interested?