Going Googleless: Day 5
14-Feb, 2009
It’s day 5 of going Googleless and to be honest it’s not that bad. It was a bit of a struggle ensuring everything that I was syncing between my iPhone, MacBook, and the Google “cloud” was either being “paused,” redirected, or replaced. Trying this little experiment has me a little concerned about really effing something up, like the 327 contacts my wife and I share or initiating an endless sync loop of some sort.
I already had a Zenbe account, which is a combination of Gmail, Yahoo! mail, and Zimbra all rolled into one and has received very good reviews. Despite being very easy to use, gorgeous to look at, and having access to email, calendar, Twitter, Facebook, and a mashup page similar to iGoogle it’s just not quite ready for prime time, in my humble opinion. The service does allow you to import your addresses from Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. but you can’t currently delete your entire address book (if you muck it all up or the import gets corrupted). Zenbe does allow you to check other email accounts (and tag them accordingly) and access your mail via IMAP, but iPhone support wasn’t up to snuff. I was only able to access my inbox, not other tags (similar to folders), and deleted mail kept returning to the trash tag, despite emptying the list.
So I fired up my old Yahoo! mail account and was surprised to read that Yahoo! mail supports push on the iPhone…nice. The web interface is also substantially more tolerable with the help of the Adblock Plus Firefox addon. I simply set up my Gmail account to forward mail from my Gmail account (while keeping a copy in the inbox) to Yahoo! mail. Like Gmail, Yahoo! mail supports syncing your Mac Address Book to your account…giddy-up. Staying true to my 14-day Google-fast, I set Yahoo! as my default search engine in Firefox and on the iPhone. I noticed many of the search results are weighted towards blog entries.
Then there’s the whole, “Did I just completely eff-up my entire contact list?” thing. I had to make a lot of changes to perform this switch, which meant turning off various syncing daemons running in the background. Now, because I’m a giant nerd, I did make sure to backup my contacts and calendars before pulling the Google plug and I’m glad I did. I forgot to disable Gmail/Mac Address Book syncing while having Mobile Me turned on. This should be OK, in theory, but syncing my contacts with both services tends to muck up several of the fields. My wife got tired of Mobile Me telling her that “more than 5% of her contacts were going to be changed” and just pressed the “Yes” button. Oops…my fault. So I had to blow away the corrupted contacts in the Mobile Me “cloud” with the good ones on my MacBook then pull those good contacts back down to her laptop. Sigh.
So I have been using the following “alternatives” without much pain and suffering:
I do miss the [clean, fast] Gmail interface and keyboard shortcuts. Yahoo! mail has similar shortcuts, but I now have to retrain my mind/fingers. As much as I have been enjoying NetNewsWire on the iPhone, Google Reader still takes first place in the mobile RSS/feed reader race.
What say you Google Haters? Any good Google alternatives hiding under a rock?
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