Freemor's Old Weblog

Google Free…

This was originally just going to be an “WooHoo!! I’m finally Google free…” post. However when I posted on identi.ca about finally becoming Google free many people wanted to know more.. and several people have responded to me due to my Blogging on such things asking for more info. This has led to a complete re-write of the original post to make it more instructive.

But First…… WooHoo.. I’m Google Free (fireworks here). I finally went ahead and deleted my Google account. (took a while to get the stragglers away from my old gmail account). But that’s it. I’m done. No more Google, Ever.

People that have been following my journey away from Flash, and Google and towards total software freedom (and enhanced privacy) Will be aware that getting Google free is something that has been in the offing for a while now. But now that I’m there I’d like to take a moment. and talk a bit about where the Journey has taken me.

The first thing I’d like to say is that If you can’t live without things like YouTube then this journey (at least to the extent that I’ve gone). Probably isn’t for you. But stick around and read on.. even if you don’t plan to follow in my footsteps you can learn about options that abound that you may have been unaware existed.

One of the loudest questions I have been getting is What did I replace “Google this” or “Google that” with. So, I’m going to make a list and talk about what I like and dislike about them.

Google Search:

I have replaced Google Search with a combination of Scroogle.org and IxQuick.com both return good results. Both offer https: connections to shut my ISP out of my searches. Scroogle is just a Google scraper and as such I may try to move away from it down the road. The further from Google the better. I’d go completely with Ixquick if it weren’t for the fact that they seem to be in love with javascript and that makes their landing page heavier then I like my homepages to be. However I recently tracked down their mobile start page and it is much lighter so I may just start there from now on.

I looked at a few other search options but none were as nice as the two above. Yacy is a very interesting project. A distributed search engine that isn’t owned by anyone. The problem with it was that the results it is currently returning weren’t overly useful for the grand and immense internet. Sadly they may be caught in a catch 22 situation. If more people used Yacy it would end up returning better results but it is hard to get people to donate resources (bandwidth for crawling etc) when they are getting questionable and limited results back. I’ll definitely re-visit Yacy in the future and see how the project is progressing.

Google Reader:

I got quite hooked on Google Reader. I’ll admit it was nice having one central place to go and read my headlnes. It however was not nice feeding Google such huge amounts of info on my interests and my thoughts on those interests. I replaced Google reader with an RSS reader built into my e-mail client claws-mail. It was quite handy having all my RSS headlines right there with my mail. It was also nice because I could set claws-mail up to read them as just text, no images, fancy formatting yelling at me. Just the info I needed and links if I wanted to delve deeper and get more info. I have recently purchased an Nokia N800 and am now using it’s RSS reader to read my morning headlines. Having it right in my hand is a huge plus and being able to read headlines without getting out of my toasty bed is a luxury I quite enjoy.

Google Mail:

This is the service that took me the longest to ditch. Not because I was overly attached to it or anything but because it takes a while to change all the listserves and forums so they now send to the new e-mail and then there was the process of waiting for all the stragglers to update their address books. even with all the time I waited and had the account sitting dormant with an auto responder telling people to use the new account I had a persons call me not 24 hours after closing the account complaining that they couldn’t send me mail Well I guess one last straggles isn’t too bad.

I replaced Google mail with Fastmail. They are paid by me and not by advertising. They offer many added features some of which I have yet to take full advantage of but one of the upshots of the services they add is a reducing of addresses people need to remember for me. Having my instant messenger address being the same as my e-mail address is just wonderful. Being able to have a web address that is extremely similar to the e-mail address I am sure will come in useful even if I haven’t made good use of it yet.

Fastmail is completely affordable. has been rock solid on the reliability front. offers pop3, smtp, ldap, imap, XMPP, and more so accessing things from my mobile device is no problem even thought I have my main laptop sucking down permanent copies of my e-mail via pop3. Their webmail interface is light and easy to navigate. and works well on light computers and without javascript. If you are thinking of moving e-mail providers I’d strongly suggest taking a look at Fastmail.fm

Google Docs:

Never used it. I found OpenOffice years ago and have never looked back. I also am opposed to storing personal info online if I don’t need to and for 99.9% of the documents I work on there is no sane reason for them to live on some anonymous computer, controlled by someone that isn’t me, in a legal jurisdiction that has less privacy rules. Do I sometimes need to have remote access to my documents? Sure. That’s what SSH is for. secure access to my home computer from any wifi hotspot.

Google Groups:

This one I never understood. This is primarily just a wrapper for the Usenet which anyone can access free, and much more privately with a news reader like Pan, or countless others. I read the few news groups that I follow with the usenet functionality of Claws-mail ( have I mentioned that I really like Claws-mail).

Google Talk:

I like to get my Identi.ca updates via Instant message. To that end I had fallen into using Google talk (well a Linux XMPP client hooked up to Google “Google talk” servers) to meet my instant messaging needs. When I switched to fastmail they also offer a federated XMPP server so it was a truly trivial matter to redirect my identi.ca updates to my new address. it was also quite easy to migrate other XMPP buddies. basically I just had to add them back once I had set up the new account in my XMPP client (psi). They’d get a one time message asking to re-authorize me at the new address and once they did that it was like nothing had changed.

Jaiku:

This was one of the first things I ditched, I was actually on Jaiku before Google took an active interest in it but once they did I bailed and bailed fast. One of the first things Google did was introduce a new “privacy policy” which I wrote about at the time because I was horrified by some of the clauses in it. Ditching Jaiku led me to the then very new identi.ca which has turned into a fantastic service, is open source, you can even run your own server is you wanted. The servers are federated so that people on different servers can still follow each other.

Gizmo5:

This is one of the more annoying moves Google has made. I didn’t use the Gizmo5 client as it was closed source but they had an very solid SIP backbone that I used for my occasional VoIP needs. I was quite annoyed when Google bought them out. I am currently transitioning to using VoipStunt. (not the software just the SIP backbone). I’ll let people know how this goes. One of the most annoying things about the whole deal is that Google has tossed Gizmo5 into a real state of limbo and so there is currently no way for me to officially cancel my account. I have completely discontinued using it but It would be nice to be able to terminate the account.

Google maps:

There are many alternatives to this some that were around before google such as mapquest.

Onto the Flash free front.

Several people have enquired about my now Flash free life.

Just to recap for those that have not been following. Due to the closed nature of Flash and it insistence on ignoring privacy settings in both the browser and itself. I decided a while ago to abandon using flash. For a while I was using Gnash an open source Flash software which does not suffer from the same privacy concerns. As time went on and with the release of Flash 10 and most sites now insisting that you have flash 10 or they wont talk to you I decided to totally abandon Flash. So now none of my devices have the ability to render Flash in any way. Perhaps more so then my move away from Google this is a step that may not be for everyone. Flash is currently pervasive on the world wide web and not having it breaks many things. (of course one could argue, and quite successfully, that Flash is outside of the HTML, and W3 standards and thus it is the web developers use of flash that is breaking things not my standards compliant browser.) As far as I am concerned Flash is the biggest bane to the world wide web rivaling even the once dreaded tag.

With the release of HTML5 that supports standards for Video streaming there is no longer a compelling reason for Flash other then using it to evade privacy settings.

So how is Life Flash Free. I think it is best described as, “a lot quieter”. There is instant decrease in blinky advertising noticed more on my mobile device as my main laptop had adblock. It is also a lot easier to focus on the meat of an article as the impulse to skip down and just watch the embedded video sound bite has now been removed. I definitely find I am having more time for other things as I simply can not waste time on Youtube or other Flash based distractions.

Does this mean that I can never watch video on the web until everyone has migrated to a proper (this means you Youtube… use Theora, not H264) implementation of HTML5. Not at all. It does mean that there are more steps involved and so I tend only to take the time for more “important” videos as the common and distracting ones are just not worth the effort. Using sites like tinyogg.com let me watch videos that otherwise wouldn’t work. There are also sites like blip.tv that offer video in other standards and I can often find the video there or an different video on the same subject.

Some things are however just plain broken. (I re-iterate that the brokenness is at the server end which is insisting on using methods outside the Web standards). A quick list of things that are borked without flash

Any Flash based video chat site:
ustream.com
snapyap.com
tokbox.com
chatroulette.com
paltalkexpress.com
etc.

Some webmails that insist on flash though many of those have a fall back to a more standard interface.

Any flash based game sites
popcap.com and many, many others

Most children’s sites are either crippled or totally borked. If your kids have “petz” you wont want to go Flash free just yet. A sad example of this is that if you go to sesamestreet.org without Flash all you get is pictures of Elmo decrying that “F is for Flash” and providing a link to the Flash download site. (a.k.a. now be a good little consumer drone and let us shoehorn you into this box)

Many miscellaneous sites. even some that one wouldn’t expect.

For me. life with out flash is enhanced. I’m less distracted, more productive and no longer is my web browsing polluted with noisy, blinky, irrelevant , crap. For me the reclaiming of my personal freedom and privacy is worth the annoyance of losing a few sites (that are flying well outside the web standards). But then one must bare in mind that I’m the type of guy that participated in the “ascii ribbon campaign” and still sends all his e-mail in plain text. (you know. so anyone can read it no matter what computer or e-mail reader they have). I would still strongly suggest that those without kids try going Flash free. You don’t need to uninstall flash to do so, just disable it in your browser for a couple weeks (I suggest a couple weeks because the first several days will be a painful awakening as you start to see just how pervasive flash has become). I’m guessing that most that can make it past the pain point of the change will see the same benefits that I have.

What flash thinggy do I miss the most.. The Stats graph on wordpress.com. But again I must say, not having it there has shifted my focus away from the numbers and back to the content. So even though I miss the thrill of watching the hits dance up and down. The loss of it has only improved things.