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Comment by astrec | Hacker News Reader

I went one step further and killed my account last week.

I went a step further still and divested myself entirely of Google services. The real name debacle made me realize just how dependent on a single company I'd become and how little recourse I might have if that company cut me off. This was particularly troubling given how Kakfaesque Google's "support" is.

So now my eggs are strewn around in several independent baskets and I intend to keep it that way.

Some postings on how people distribute their eggs and into what baskets would be interesting.

Yes! I've seen several times how people say that they'ev abandoned Google services and moved on.. but never to where.

Like, what's an alternative to syncing your own calendar and so on.

Seconded. I'm a bit interested in this, myself. Are there any comparable email services? Or calendar?

For email I went to fastmail.fm.

Blogging I'm now doing at WordPress and also a static Jekyll blog on S3.

Contacts I'm keeping in Address Book and backing up by hand.

Calendar I'm just keeping on my Phone and backing up by hand.

I'm still figuring out what to do with Picasa. May just go for static galleries on S3.

I use NewsFire on my Macbook instead of Reader.

I'm using DuckDuckGo for searching.

I never really used Google Docs anyway so that was easy.

I still use Chrome but I've turned off everything (I think!) that sends my data to Google.

All in all this is more work than a single, centralized account but I feel better about it.

well, i decided to drop gmail because of this (at first i dropped search, but nothing else was as good at the time and search is pretty much critical for my work - and i still use disconnect, ghostery and adblock plugins, so my search and browsing in general are anonymous-ish).

i looked around for a different provider. the best i found was http://www.runbox.com/ - it wasn't as good, but it was the closest (the main feature missing was tags; their support was very good).

but in the end i ended up handling email myself (on a linux box). it's very much not the equivalent, in that i use a console client (mutt). but the part that i most needed - search - works well using mairix http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ (very fast, flexible command line tool for searching maildirs).

unfortunately this doesn't generalise well - i can't imagine most people would be as happy using command line/curses based tools or configuring their own email services.

Oh how I miss MH. :) I'd use it now, except I've really gotten used to html email.

Nice tip on runbox.com.

I've been compiling a list of places that I could move to and use my own domain.

So far I had:

lavabit.com fastmail.fm zoho.com domains.live.com

Might give them all a go and report back in a Jekyll created blog post on S3 :-)

I started a thread at the top level: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999815

Maybe you could start a spreadsheet on Google Docs. :)

How exactly do you do that? I don't see a way to just remove G+.

I did. You can remove your Google+ account but still keep all other services (I still use Adwords and Analytics).

If you're not going to completely leave, then I would recommend leaving your G+ account intact, and just don't use it anymore. Delete your posts and pictures if you like, but don't delete the account itself.

I believe I recall reading Google itself saying that if you delete your G+ account, that has the same effect as if Google had suspended your account (whatever that means from day to day).

So I believe, whether you self-terminate or suffer suspension) that you lose partial functionality on Picasa. You can still store photos, but anything related to sharing is dead. Don't know if that affects pictures on Blogger.

For Reader, I think you can still use it, but you can't share posts.

Or something.

I don't use Picasa or Reader so this was not an issue for me. Strange the way that each system seems to behave differently.

If you think in a level or two, it's not that strange. Although Google Plus gets the buzz, it's the Profile that's the real product; Plus is just honey for the flies. The purpose of the Profile is to connect your Real Identity with your activity, specifically your social activity, and to correlate with the activities of your network of connections. So sharing posts in Reader and pictures in Picasa are social activities, and therefore interesting to Google.

As time goes on, more Google services will take on more social activity. There's Data in them thar hills! Email, by the way, is the ultimate social activity. Google knows that, because they give you 7G space just for email storage. So expect your gmail account to some day be at as much risk of loss as any other Google service, by their TOS, if you run afoul of the Real Name policy, or any other anti-social policy that they come up with.

There might be a couple reasons why your Real Name connected with yours and others' activity is interesting to Google. Either they're trying to help you have a civilized conversation with known associates in the online equivalent of a fancy coat and tie required restaurant with an assortment of mysterious cutlery and gold rimmed crystal. Or they want to make ads more valuable.

I think I hear Occam sharpening up his razor.

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