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August 9, 2011

Current Google status (, )

by fluffy at 12:23 AM

So at this point I have migrated my calendar data to my own DAViCal installation (which is mostly working except for sending/receiving invites - gotta figure out what's going on with that), deleted both of my Apps accounts, and also deleted a bunch of GMail accounts which I had lying around which had somehow (and rather creepily) gotten linked to each other anyway. I still have one gmail account for Android Market and I see no reason to get rid of that just yet, and I've relinked my YouTube account to that since there's no way to have YouTube without a Google account anymore.

It's kind of scary to be without a safety net here but on the other hand, it was also kind of scary about what sorts of stuff Google was doing in the background without my knowledge as well. (I mean, for a time, trying to log on to my YouTube account to relink it was logging me on to a completely different gmail account that I'd forgotten about, and it was insisting that I needed to create a new YouTube account as part of it! Very broken in stupid ways. But once I deleted that old gmail account, that freed up the legacy YouTube account to be relinked. Puzzling all around, though.)

Many of my friends who were on G+ with pseudonyms that hadn't gotten nuked yet went ahead and deleted their accounts too. We're all back to using LiveJournal and email.

Oh, and for a while I was thinking I'd made a mistake since all of the CalDAV clients I found for Android were standalone calendar apps (rather than CalendarProvider implementations as they should be), but finally I found CalDAV-sync which seems to be working quite nicely. It's $3 and still alpha, but that's worth it (hopefully they don't get nuked from orbit for no reason like Better Android did). They also have a CardDAV provider as well, for when I finally remove my addressbook from the one gmail account.

One missing thing for this is the ability to subscribe to friends' shared calendars, but I can still do that via my Android gmail account for now.

Hopefully there will eventually be some turnkey F/OSS suite to make it easy to set up this stuff. Email is well-known and so on, but CalDAV is still sort of nascent as far as interoperability goes.

Oh, and there's probably still a few Google account remnants out there. My apps accounts' associated Google accounts are still active (with no way to shut them off), and since I have FeedBurner and AdSense/AdWords associated with one of them, that'll probably continue to exist for a while. Which reminds me, I must get rid of all the AdSense on my site... (I've made like $29 over all time on Google page ads, so I mean, yeah. No big loss.)

Comments

#14124 08/09/2011 02:43 pm
I'm trying to wean myself off the Google teat as well. Currently in the process of downloading my thousands of archived e-mails from across all my gmail accounts and backing up all my YouTube stuff. After which point I'll delete all my gmail profiles except one (only keeping because my Android phone is the one Google thing I can't replace with something else) and delete my Google apps accounts. I'm just sick of dealing with all of it and I hate the way online anonymity is slowly becoming the exception rather than the rule.

I probably won't be able to get rid of my Facebook account since it's the primary way RL friends and family know to get ahold of me, but I'll certainly do everything I can to keep it and my online persona separated. I'll only rejoin Google+ if they start allowing pseudonyms.

I guess it's kind of foolish of me to just start worrying about this stuff now, but hindsight's 20/20 and other cliches.
#14125 08/09/2011 03:07 pm
If you need calendar hosting I could set you up an account on e-snail.us (and same goes for email). It's a bit unstable at the moment, though, and I'm likely to change CalDAV servers at some point (davical is kind of weird and puts chattiness over useful information) so I'm not ready to commit to the long-term stability of whatever data is stored in there at present. CalDAV-sync for Android is working very well for me, in any case.

The way I migrated my email was to just copy my 'all mail' folder from my various GMail accounts into my new IMAP server. It went pretty quick but my local mail app already had most of it downloaded anyway. Another friend who's doing this same thing said they were being throttled to something like 100 messages per hour, which is what I also ran into last time I moved my crap off GMail (but fortunately I already had most of a complete archive already so only had to transfer the last couple months' worth from GMail itself).
#14126 08/09/2011 03:08 pm
By the way, is there a (supported) way to download your videos from YouTube? Not that I care about any of the videos I have up there but that would make a big difference for some people.
#14127 08/09/2011 03:41 pm
Spam filter ate my last comment (I guess cause I posted a lot of links), not sure if it was deleted entirely or just quarantined, but I use the Firefox plugin BYtubeD to generate a list of download links for all my videos, then DownThemAll to queue & download them. (the stable version of BYtubeD is broken, but they link to a working version.)

That's just because I have a lot of videos though, if you just have a few YouTube lets you just download them from your "my videos" page. Just click the arrow next to "Edit | Insight" and choose "download MP4".

Interestingly this is the only official way to get videos off YouTube according to the "Data Liberation Front" site. They don't have any sort of official bulk downloading support.
#14128 08/09/2011 03:44 pm
I have no moderation queue on this comment system, so if a post got eaten it was eaten permanently. However, registered users shouldn't have a link limit. The only link-based spam filter I know of is for unregistered posters.
#14129 08/09/2011 03:55 pm
I must have posted from the wrong browser. Whoops.

It's funny, I'm doing all this to simplify things, stop using Google services, and stop having to use multiple browsers to juggle my Google accounts... but because Firefox is so shitty now, I ended up using Google's browser anyway... but I still need to use Firefox to use the plugins that let me back everything up. UGH.
#14130 08/09/2011 03:58 pm
I don't have a problem using Chrome or Android while simultaneously avoiding the hell out of their web services. For that matter I don't mind using Google for web search (because, let's face it, it's STILL the best search engine out there). Where I'm drawing the line is where they collect personal information that's explicitly about me and trying to tie it to other publicly-visible services that I may or may not have control over; anything that requires or supports a Google Profile is out of the question. For example.
#14131 08/09/2011 10:19 pm
Oh, I probably should have linked you to this a couple days ago...
#14132 08/09/2011 10:41 pm
Ooh, neat. I'd forgotten about OpenStreetMaps... I wonder if they have an Android app yet. I think that's the only proprietary bit in Android that I actually use.

That list is kind of laughably incomplete for blogging and microblogging though. No Movable Type or identi.ca?

I wonder how Zimbra is. If it's a turnkey solution for everything I'm trying to do, maybe I'll just switch to that. It certainly sounds like it does everything I want (namely being an opensource Exchange-alike).
#14141 08/13/2011 12:07 pm
Wow, good thing you linked me to that page when you did. Since that time it's been squished down into 'list of free software web apps' and from there it's been nominated for deletion. Thanks, Wikipedia. You're so useful.