I have been in a decade long relationship with Google, and while it’s never been stale, it may be time for a separation. What holds a relationship together most is trust, and trust is currently a two-fold problem for Google.
One, Google’s been caught going behind my back and giving the NSA private, personal information like my live searches, my Gmail messages, and even my Google Maps activity. The creepy level of intimacy will only get worse with the wearable computer and facial recognition device Google Glass recording conversations and tracking eye movements.
Two, you can easily get attracted to Google and its free services, but the problem with free is Google can pull the plug whenever profits are down. Google recently cancelled beloved Google Reader, which was many people’s digital newspaper. Customizable homepage iGoogle, which has been around for 8 years, shuts down in November. Geolocation tool Google Latitude will be discontinued next month. Check out the list of over 80 more services Google has put out to pasture.
No matter how much you may enjoy this relationship, it’s not smart putting all your eggs in Google’s basket, because she may break your heart. Here’s a look at alternative services you can use in place of Google’s web apps.
How to Divorce Google in 10 Easy Steps
Google has just rolled out advertisements as e-mail messages in Gmail users’ inboxes, continuing to blur the line between your ads and emails.
Ads in GMAIL – sent as normal emails. Anyone else saw this? pic.twitter.com/oAgaT1mcAJ
— antonio.gulli (@gulliantonio) July 18, 2013
While Google is committed to serving you relevant ads, Mozilla gives you the option to reject intrusive tracking via “Do Not Track”. Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross platform email, news, and chat desktop-based client that customizes to your needs. You also receive a high degree of privacy thanks to message encyption, digital signing, “Do Not Track”, and a built-in phishing detector.
DuckDuckGo is an anonymous search engine that does not record user information. To compare, Google tracks and saves your searches, which can be legally requested. That’s why DuckDuckGo received a significant upswing from 1.8 to 3 million daily searches when the NSA spying allegations broke.
Tom’s Hardware held their annual Web Browser Grand Prix where they judge the top five web browsers in eight different categories and Mozilla Firefox won for the first time ever. Firefox took home the crown thanks to “no apparent weaknesses and generally strong finishes all-around, combined with near-native start times, greatly-improved hardware acceleration scores, and almost-perfect reliability.”
For a quick smartphone browser, ditch Chrome and give the speedy Dolphin a try. Dolphin is a free browser that is so customizable that you don’t even need to type; simply browser with a swipe of your finger or the sound of your voice.
Google Drive has quickly become one of the best Google products available due to a nice mix of documents, storage, and file sharing, but there’s always a downside. In the terms of service, Google reserves the right to “use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute” content uploaded to their services. So presumably, Google can take a picture from your wedding day and add fire-breathing dragons to it if they so choose. Also, all Drive contents are currently un-encrypted, but thankfully Google is currently experimenting with file encryption.
Create your own cloud storage service that you control with free, open source framework ownCloud. ownCloud handles all your personal organization needs with syncing files, notes, calendars, and more. Check out the live demo to see if it replaces the Drive-sized hole in your heart.
If you don’t like ownCloud or a good old fashioned planner for your calendar needs, try Zoho Calendar out. Zoho schedules, manages and tracks your meetings and events. Groups and teams can share their plans so everyone is on the same page; also share only what you want to with who you want to for increased privacy.
Google’s monopoly on the map market is so strong that the FTC has launched an anti-trust investigation into their 1.1 billion dollar purchase of Israeli map app Waze. The issue is “whether Waze would have become a head-to-head competitor with Google […] or whether there is any evidence, such as emails, that showed Google wanted to acquire the company only to keep it from rivals.”
Whether Waze will become integrated with Google Maps remains to be seen; until then, Waze is still the best competitor by offering real-time traffic, road info, speed traps, and nearby gas prices. Check out Waze’s live map to see the magic in action.
If you are looking for free, hosted blogs, Blogger is still where it’s at, but there’s always that possibility of Google shutting down Blogger to continue their Google+ migration, which would force millions of blogs to find new homes. The smart move would be to trust WordPress, who is currently the most popular blogging system, boasting over 60 million websites worldwide. WordPress has a web template system using a template processor, allowing users to install and switch themes, widgets, and plugins effortlessly. HostDime offers WordPress FREE for all customers.
Chat program Pidgin is used to connect all of HostDime’s employees across multiple continents. The Windows and Linux app supports over 80 different languages and 16 different chat networks. You can be messaging on Yahoo chat, AIM, and yes, Google Talk, all at the same time.
Google Picasa users were in for a surprise a few months ago when, without warning, all photo albums were migrated over to Google+. To help soften the blow, Google offered 15 GB’s of space for photo storage. Around the same time, Yahoo gave Flickr a beautiful makeover, enticing users to come back with 1 terabyte of space. That’s enough space for 537,731 smartphone photos! You are also given the option to turn off advertising for a small fee, something Google doesn’t offer.
Google recently launched an impressive music subscription service called Google Play Music All Access to battle with Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, Rdio, and countless more like them. Upload up to 20,000 songs you already own for free, and pay $10 for the full experience.
The most similar service to Google Play is Grooveshark, which is free and uses music uploaded by users, artists, and labels to make up its catalog of over 15 million songs. Users can search and find music by song, artist, album, genre, browsing through friends’ recent activity, and other users’ playlists. Grooveshark also allows creating and editing playlists to embed to your website. Grooveshark is available for Android, but it’s a bit trickier to listen on your iPhone.
How is your relationship with Google going? Are there better Google alternatives worth looking into? Let us know in the comments!
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Jared Smith is HostDime’s Content Marketer. Follow him on Twitter.
HostDime.com is one of the top 50 web hosts in the world. Check out HostDime’s entire fully managed product line.
WAZE?
Good Article, but Waze seems out of place.
Migrating to a google acquired product is hardly a move away from google, is it?
Anyway, I just took a look at waze and it’s coverage is severely limited.
I think it’s a shame you mentioned it, you’ll only drive traffic there, pointlessly.
openstreetmap.org might have been a better choice.
I love me some Waze, so it was a shame when it was bought up. But with the FTC investigation ongoing, Waze won’t be integrated with Google anytime soon, therefore I’m gonna keep using it until the possible switch-over.
I remember Open Street Maps from their quick mapping of refugee camps and roads in Haiti after the earthquake a few years ago. Thanks for the suggestion!
How do you leave Google as a traffic source for your website? Hostdime doesn’t seem to use Adwords so you’re really divorcing 😉
I just +1 your post 😉
Now we need a Google Voice replacement!
My problem was with Adsense. I had had an 11 year presence with Adsense. While I didn’t get rich, I did receive about $80K in revenue over the decade+. The last few years I had not touched the web site that contained Google’s ads. Then one day I get an email from Google stating that my account had been closed and that basically Google was going another direction. It was not terms of service violation, they just didn’t want to keep the account open. I promptly closed down several other Google services I was using including a small monthly investment in Adwords advertising for other sites.
this is great. we are way too dependent on google these days and the problem is there is really not any good alternative so that is why we keep stick to them