[kalistoga]

In fact, more and more I want to encourage my friends to stay away from gmail. Hell even I'm in the process of moving away from using Google accounts.

I can understand that Google is trying to collect as much user data in as accurate way as possible, but recently it's been increasingly annoying how they are trying to fix what's not broken.

I have multiple google accounts for different purposes, and recently Google started disallowing multi-user access to their sites. This is extremely inconvenient and annoying for me that I'm even thinking about switching to another email provider. In fact I have already started using ymail for certain purposes.

I might be a minority for now, but I see this annoyance will only accelerate in the future for even ordinary people as Google tries to fight against Facebook with identity.

What do you all think?

[mirkules]

Personally, I still use Gmail because IMAP and POP access is still available. My machine at home downloads my emails via IMAP while I'm at work. No problem.

But I find it creepy knowing that Google is keeping an eye on everything I do. Therefore, I started to diversify: use Bing for search, use Bing or Yahoo! maps, never stay logged into Google services... actually these are the only Google services I use regularly, so that's pretty much it. I do have to say, for searching programming stuff Bing is kinda "meh" but livable.

I do have a question: suppose you sign into your Google account, and now your account is correlated with your IP address, then you sign out. I wonder if Google keeps track of searches from your IP address while you are signed out and correlates it with your account (perhaps with a little less weight)?

Edit: Forgot to mention Android. Definitely more than creepy.

Also, even if Microsoft is collecting information, it means MS will have only some of the info.

[kalistoga]

Who knows what they are doing behind.

What I'm annoyed about is that they seem like they are trying to commit suicide. I can understand they want to "leverage" their existing assets, but the sacrifice is too much.

As you said, there's no problem if you use IMAP and POP access with your desktop client, and therein lies the problem. Google is supposed to bring everything to the cloud. They used to be good at it. But they are now going backwards and making people become dependent on devices. I already see many people using the mail client Sparrow just for that reason.

I think they've lost their mind being too obsessed with Facebook and Twitter.