Goodbye Google: The Epilogue

It’s been a few months since I gave a shot at eliminating much of Google from my life. I wasn’t going to revisit the series with this epilogue so early, but with the company’s acquisition of Sparrow (my former email client of choice) late last week I felt that moving it up a week or two wasn’t a bad idea.

And I did say on my Twitter feed that I had a ton of great thoughts and admissions that I drafted up during the past few weeks. Well, this article reveals the first admission…of many.

Let’s start with how my “Goodbye Google” experiment has fared as of today.

I tried to use my web host as my mail provider, and was largely successful up until recently. There was little to no downtime during my run with hosted mail, but I recently started getting disk usage warnings – something I never got while using Gmail. Sure, I could’ve spent time working through this – but I don’t want to spend time tweaking with email; I just want to be able to send it and receive it as needed.

So this week I moved Vardy.me email back to Google Apps. Convenience won out.

I’ve managed to steer clear of using Google for search, sticking with DuckDuckGo ever since making the switch and Bing on my iOS devices. And I’m not missing Google in that regard, so there’s that.

That said…I am starting to look at Google+ again.

I haven’t waded back into those waters yet, but I am giving Chris Brogan’s book, Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything, a read — and a lot of what’s in there makes sense for me to take advantage of (based on what I do for a living). I’m also missing out on some connections through the service, and those connections are becoming as important in many cases as the ones I’ve developed on Facebook. Twitter is still my primary social network (and I can’t see that changing anytime soon), but there are aspects of Google+ that intrigue me more than ever before. I’m keeping my eye on it, and may dip my toe into the pool (as scarcely populated as it may seem to be) once again.

I’ve managed to steer clear of the whole search aspect of Google, which was one of my major concerns going into this experiment a few months back. But it is clear to me that when it’s convenience you want, Google has a leg up.

And if Sparrow’s team ends up making Gmail’s iOS apps better, then I may dive into those waters as well.

Photo credit: Aray Chen (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)