Are You Owned By Google?

[Naralas]

I thought the title was catchy.

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d19/kor667/googlemain.png
This page is my life. My primary email window shows me any emails that are in my inbox (the ones filtered out to labels are not personal and thus, not immediately important). I also have feeds, thanks to a friend who turned me on to Google Reader, which keeps me busy busy at work in between tech supporting all those lame apple users. (I hate apple)

I have just started using Google bookmarks, I have a bookmark there about a really detailed article on ext3 which I wanted to read tonight after I was done work, and one for a nice computer retailer. In the near future it will be a lot more useful to me as I plan to move most of my mozilla bookmarks to it RIGHT after making this post.

My calendar has all university related due dates, all my paydays up until my planned quit date, all my friends birthdays (and it drops me a line 1 week in advance so I can pretend I have a good memory) and soon it will have a project finish date because me and some work friends are having a "build your own distro" competition. It's gonna change my life.

Docs and settings has notes, which is a document filled with... little notes... my resume follows me around the web and can be downloaded in almost any format! I even chopped off the google SEARCH feature to save space using that little "homepage maximizer" (also takes out the tabs and the disclamer at the bottom... all optional)

Oh and that little todo list program is JUST right. Not to heavy and not to slim. Has three priority levels, and you just click to add, or click to remove an item. Perfection.

I use google without the search. If I want to search I use the bar that is in firefox or click "classic google"...

Thats right. Google's search feature is now the least attractive thing they offer to me. How crazy is that? (There search is getting baaaaaaad lately anyway, it proves with adsense and with "try the image search" that it CAN find EXACTLY what you want, but when you go to try manually search, the PERFECT results you got in the preview windows are scattered across the 5th and 6th page..)

Anyway, I am entirely mobile outside of developing software. And I love it. And suggest trying it. Are you owned by google? Post proof!

[starcraft.man]

Uh, just a note but you should blacken your email.... I dunno if you want it public. Top right.

As for the rest... Google doesn't own me too much. I use their search engine and gmail. That is all. I don't store vast amounts of info there, nor do they have anything personal really apart from my IP. My email doesn't store anything really important. I'd rather they had my info then MS though... Google may have a bad privacy policy but after everything MS has pulled I wouldn't trust em with air.

Oh and hey there fellow Canadian, love seeing more of us around :D.

[Kingsley]

Now that I think about it, Yahoo! Mail kinda owns me. I prefer my Hotmail account for e-mail but the notepad in my Yahoo e-mail account houses tons of my personal stuff. It has lots of my ID/passwords, software serial numbers, phone numbers, links and guides for technical stuff, and tips/guides that I've saved from around the web that'll help me achieve my future career.

Since I've had the account for 6 years, I get at least 100 new e-mails a day in my spam folder. That's annoying so I may consider switching to Google, which also has everything useful that you've shown in the screenshot.

[dpar]

Nope. Just a search engine. I like to keep as much of my personal stuff as I can, personal.

[Naralas]

Nobody likes having a mobile command center?

Life follows you where you chose to login?

Oh and, I don't care to much about the email on a nix community forum. Only people here I don't trust are windows users...

[walkerk]

I use gmail with thunderbird.. hardly ever login in to it via web access

[Warpnow]

I use gmail with the gmail apps and my own domain...they kinda own me :D

And he shouldn't have to worry about his email, its not in text, the crawlers won't get 'im.

[RAV TUX]

I thought the title was catchy.

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d19/kor667/googlemain.png
This page is my life. My primary email window shows me any emails that are in my inbox (the ones filtered out to labels are not personal and thus, not immediately important). I also have feeds, thanks to a friend who turned me on to Google Reader, which keeps me busy busy at work in between tech supporting all those lame apple users. (I hate apple)

I have just started using Google bookmarks, I have a bookmark there about a really detailed article on ext3 which I wanted to read tonight after I was done work, and one for a nice computer retailer. In the near future it will be a lot more useful to me as I plan to move most of my mozilla bookmarks to it RIGHT after making this post.

My calendar has all university related due dates, all my paydays up until my planned quit date, all my friends birthdays (and it drops me a line 1 week in advance so I can pretend I have a good memory) and soon it will have a project finish date because me and some work friends are having a "build your own distro" competition. It's gonna change my life.

Docs and settings has notes, which is a document filled with... little notes... my resume follows me around the web and can be downloaded in almost any format! I even chopped off the google SEARCH feature to save space using that little "homepage maximizer" (also takes out the tabs and the disclamer at the bottom... all optional)

Oh and that little todo list program is JUST right. Not to heavy and not to slim. Has three priority levels, and you just click to add, or click to remove an item. Perfection.

I use google without the search. If I want to search I use the bar that is in firefox or click "classic google"...

Thats right. Google's search feature is now the least attractive thing they offer to me. How crazy is that? (There search is getting baaaaaaad lately anyway, it proves with adsense and with "try the image search" that it CAN find EXACTLY what you want, but when you go to try manually search, the PERFECT results you got in the preview windows are scattered across the 5th and 6th page..)

Anyway, I am entirely mobile outside of developing software. And I love it. And suggest trying it. Are you owned by google? Post proof!

Nope, I only occasionally use a google search via YubNub. I do have a Google page I must admit, but hardly ever use it except to watch the live sea otter cam on it.

EDIT: I iGoogle!
see this thread to see how deeply I iGoogle!: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3021995#post3021995

[euler_fan]

Nobody likes having a mobile command center?

Life follows you where you chose to login?



While I have a gmail account, I'm with walkerk--I use it from thunderbird and rarely log in online.

And I have a mobile command center--my lappy :)

[Depressed Man]

I guess? Partially?

I do use gmail as one of my main emails. But I get it through Thunderbird. And I do use Google Desktop Search on Windows (lacking Beagle there). I don't use notebook that much, but I do use their calendar, documents, and mapping and earth program.

Though most of the things I use aren't through Google directly. For editting google calendar I use rainlendar. For the desktop search i use a program someone else built that goes on top of it. And so on.

[reyfer]

My start page on Firefox is my personal iGoogle page

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e187/reyjfb/new%20rey/th_amazon3.jpg (http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e187/reyjfb/new%20rey/amazon3.jpg)

[runningwithscissors]

No. I only use the search. And no, I don't search from a "google bar". I log on to the page and run searches (or sometimes use the shortcuts in konqueror).

Also, I use yahoo's mail to catch spam from internet forum/website/random registrations.

[ThinkBuntu]

No. I purged my GMail account after downloading all my messages via POP a year ago, and messages are deleetd as I download them. Mozilla Sunbird and Thunderbird handle my mail and calendar, and of course I have Abiword/Gnumeric for office tasks. Picasa is a crap program in Linux, so I use Digikam or F-spot, depending on the OS (or the nice iPhoto on my Mac). Beyond that, Google only owns my search. Often I'm logged in when I search, so they probably have a nifty little cache of my search history.

[mike102282]

google doesn't really own me I use gmail and google maps, but that is about it.

[Frak]

It only redirects me so instead of having to type ubuntu.com in my URL bar, I can just type ubuntu.
Firefox + Google = FTW! :guitar:

[@trophy]

Nope. Just a search engine. I like to keep as much of my personal stuff as I can, personal.

+1

[Schoappied]

see also:
http://socialdiscussion.com/off-topic-talk/5536-abandon-google.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=159899&page=2

You think you're free of Microsoft, but you're grabbed by Google....
And maybe it's time to free yourself ;)

[stepan2]

i only use it as a search engine. I never knew that there were such services that displayed your mail and such . wow

[amadeus266]

Free Yourself! as Schoappied stated. I have a lot of these features set up for access from just about anywhere using a free dyn dns account to connect to my own pc which has a mail server, voice mail, calendar, etc. As far as a search engine, I have several options besides Google. Oh, and don't forget the hardware firewall.

[Depressed Man]

I always wanted to do that. Though right now I'm on a direcway connection (so any dys dns accounts just direct me to the direcway system modem).

And when I'm at the University of Maryland I still haven't figured out how to get past Maryland's settings yet. Shame.. I sometimes leave my desktop on and I would like to be access my music server when I'm at home or at a cousin's house.

[secretspicy15]

Nobody likes having a mobile command center?

Life follows you where you chose to login?


oh yeah! It is very nice when one has to use a lot of different computers using different OS's. I have this one at home, dual booting ubuntu and winXP(sadly still needed for some classwork), computers at work, computers in the labs on campus, mom's computer, brother's computer and so on and so on.... I can just set up shop anywhere i need to. granted they know everything about me, but it's bound to happen...

[cleverselfreferentialname]

Recently got unowned by google. Stopped using it as a search engine for the most part in favor of www.clusty.com and www.gigablast.com. I never had gmail, but there are lots of nice, less corporate email vendors out there. If only I can find one that I could trust with my privacy.

At any rate: bluebottle.com, lavabit.com, gmx.net are a few. There are more, just can't remember them clearly.

Google Desktop search is kinda scary, no thanks.

An AES256-encrypted disk and dban help a lot :)

[Depressed Man]

Not a big fan of Google Desktop Search either. But I use it because I can't find a Windows alternative to beagle. :(

Well even if there was, it has to index my emails from Thunderbird.

[Frak]

You could use Windows Search bar (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3d738fc2d e-49b9-4e69-9227-2206277ab7c9%26DisplayLang%3den).

[Depressed Man]

The windows one isn't as powerful though (when I could remember actually searching from it). I have both it and GDS running on my laptop though. To bad they can't share databases.