After the Buzz fiasco, we have to assume Google will do it again, maybe in a different context, or accidentally, or slowly. Maybe they did us a favor. People have been concerned about Google and privacy for a while. Boiling a frog only works if you don’t suddenly raise the temperature and wake the frog. Google Buzz made me think about what how much I use Google. The first result of that, somewhat tangential, was setting up a Twitter account – see my recent posts in the right sidebar.
Twitter may not be a complete waste of time. I’ll use it for links, or observations too pithy to blog. (Because, you know, one mustn’t have an unpublished thought…) But I’m not using it on my cell phone. People will just have to wait for status updates until I get back to the house. And how does Twitter (d)evolve? Next year Amazon will present a new service where users just grunt at each other. “Yo! Huh? Lookit. Ungh! Heh.”
Mono-culture is bad
But what to do about Google and Gmail? Lots of responses are possible, from “Don’t worry, be happy” to “Rapelcg rirelguvat.” Everyone has to choose some combination of privacy and convenience. I will make incremental changes, and avoid using any one company too much.
The first step (not sure my Twitter counts) was to start using other search engines. Not because Microsoft (with Bing) or Yahoo is any better than Google, but because nobody should have a record of all my searches, on general principles. Mono-culture is bad. So, whenever I think about it I search with Clusty, or Bing, or Yahoo.
That’s a small start. Going forward I’ll consider how I do things, and what changes might give me more privacy and use fewer of Google’s products.
UPDATE: How To: Escape From Google’s Clutches, Once and For All – informative and thorough, but maybe a bit extreme at this point.
I have to quibble….
As great an image as the “boiled frog” is, it doesn’t work. The water will get to just above what is good for the frog, and the frog moves.
If someone can come up with something half as good as google’s search, it will take off– sadly, bing, clusty and yahoo aren’t those searches. They’re messy, don’t give nearly as good of results. Idealism will only move a small group– quality has to be offered, too.
So a real frog will jump out? That’s comforting, really:-) I guess we keep the simile because people are inferior to frogs, in this way.
Are the others less good than Google search? I’m not so sure. Doc Rampage liked Clusty. Bing, which I’ve been using today, seems pretty good, but I’ll have to use it a while to know. Tomorrow I’ll use Yahoo. There’s also Amazon for some things, which is unlikely to work as well as Google Book Search, and there’s Project Gutenberg, and Wolfram Alpha. Looking at it from the micro view – Me and My Needs – they don’t have to take off. They just have to be there as an alternative. If they go under, someone else will proably launch another I can use.
Hehe, they are designed to monitor their own temperature more than we are. ^.^ Dang mammals.
I’ve tried them– clusty has a good start, but simply doesn’t turn up the stuff I’ve used to test it. Yahoo didn’t even pop up the stuff on its own system that I used to test it– I was in some yahoo sim groups, way back when. Bing is slightly better, but cluttered and pulls the Microsoft trick of telling you what it thinks you want without asking first, and when you say “No, I really wanted X, not your Y”– it shows you Y, again, with a little X down the page. Plus, their image search is horrible.
Clusty is the best so far, but it’s still not up to being a google replacement. I do hope it gets good enough to do so, if for no other reason than competition is healthy, but…..
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Humiliating admission: I only have stayed on Google’s blog software, I have switched to google comments (to help them keep track of my loyal following) and have bought a Droid phone and sign onto it with Google. Oh, and I have started going back to Google for searches once in a while.
Sigh. It’s a constant battle between healthy paranoia and unhealthy laziness. The laziness is winning too often of late. That is, of course, what Google is counting on.
Huh, ten years later Google is Sony.