november 27, 2013I am diversifying my online activities and moving away from using so much Google stuff. Here is some of what I am going to do or have already have done:
- For my mobile device, I switched from Nexus 5 to iPhone 5S. So far the iPhone has been great. It was an easy transition and there is a lot to like about iOS. Two things in iOS are much better the keyboard and mail management. The Android keyboard -- whether default OS keyboard or third party (Swype or Swiftkey) -- never worked well. The iOS keyboard just works. And for mail, I hate how Google splits Gmail out by itself and leaves all other mail accounts to the email app. Unify! Unify!
- I have switched search to DuckDuckGo. But, I know I will still use Google for some searches, but the search proxy StartPage looks good for doing Google searches anonymously.
- I have switched Docs, Contacts and Calendar over to Outlook.com since I do not use an Android device anymore and Google Contacts and Calendar were the best way to handle those functions with Android. I tried Outlook.com with Android, but Android does not sync multiple calendars with Outlook.com. iOS has nice integration with Outlook.com and syncs everything fine. The interface for all three functions is cleaner and better integrated than Google's Gmail Contacts, Calendar and Drive.
- Music is a hard one. I am giving Amazon's Cloudplayer a try as an alternative to Google Music for storing and playing my own music collection. It is not going well though. Amazon's Cloudplayer web and iOS interfaces are very rudimentary. The uploader for Amazon really sucks and does not have functionality to monitor folders for changes and upload automatically. Streaming music is with Pandora One.
- I use Gmail for a lot of my emailing which is used for signing up for stuff. I will keep that around for a bit, but I have been using Yahoo Mail for all my new stuff. Personal email always went to my personal server, so there is not much change there.
- I left Google+ a month or two ago -- around the same time I left Facebook -- and have been using both Twitter and App.net. I just stopped using App.net since I have more people to interact with on Twitter and I am not finding much value in App.net at this moment.
- I have switched my mobile voicemail back to T-Mobile's visual voicemail. It is not that big of a deal since I do not get many phone calls. I still use Google Voice for voicemail for the home phone and I also use my Google Voice number for my public phone number.
- I never used Picasa for photos since I have always been a big user and fan of Flickr.
- There really is not a good replacement for YouTube and I wish there was because Google's changes to YouTube are pretty annoying (ie. Google+! Google+! Google+! Google+!). Vimeo and DailyMotion are close.
- For Maps, on the desktop I am experimenting Here.com from Nokia (which also powers Yahoo Maps and Bing Maps). It seems pretty good for what I need maps on a desktop for: Looking up traffic conditions. On iOS, I use Apple Maps which has improved greatly since its release.
- I replaced Google Talk/Hangouts with WhatsApp, text messaging and Yahoo Messenger. I would still use Hangouts to chat with my wife, but the iOS Hangouts app requires a Google+ account to sign in and I don't want a Google+ account.
- Google Reader died and at first I used Fever, but have since settled on Digg Reader after trying Feedly and Feedbin.
- Last but not least, I switched my web browser from Chrome over to Firefox a long while ago and haven't looked back since.
Thoughts? Have you diversified your online activity?
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