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Beginning a Google diet.

For years and years I really liked Google. They gave me great online tools and services for free, built astounding things that helped us all and, perhaps most importantly, just seemed like a nice company. As much as a commercial entity can, at least. Yes, there was the whole mining-information-about-me thing but hey! they’re nice folks, they’re not going to do anything shady with it.

So what has changed? Very little, i guess. They still provide great online tools and services, these are still (mostly) free and Google continues to build astounding things that help us all. It’s just that my opinion of them has shifted. Despite their motto, to me Google no longer seems like a nice company. I can’t pinpoint one thing that caused this change, rather it has been a gradual process – an accumulation of niggles and doubts. And i think Google’s recent decision to shutdown Google Reader (which they’d made the de facto RSS service, having destroying all the competition with a great, free product) was the catalyst i needed to finally make some changes.

Beginning today i’m going to try1 to stop being Google’s product.

This blog (and various other pages at sallonoroff.co.uk) no longer uses Google Analytics. And it no longer makes use of FeedBurner2. I’m in the process of ditching Reader before it vanishes on 1st July, I’ve already migrated the one remaining Google Calendar i still used and i will, once i figure out how, be removing myself from google+. Chrome too will lose out to Safari and/or Firefox. Lastly – and this is the biggy for me – having managed to download a local copy of all my messages, i’ll also no longer be using Gmail for my personal email.

Will Google care? No, of course not. They’ll not notice. But then fortunately i don’t think i will either.

  1. Yes, i admit it, i will probably continue googling with Google. As much as i’d like to go elsewhere, nothing comes close to Google’s search. Sorry, DuckDuckGo. ↩

  2. Apologies to the handful of people reading this blog using Feedburner’s email subscription function. The RSS feed should re-direct but as far as i can tell i’ve no replacement for email. ↩