[SageRaven]

Well, whatever works for them. I've been using gmail since my '04 invite, but a few weeks ago I migrated to mail.com for web mail and bing for search. Google lured me in with the sparse simplicity of their search and webmail. If everything Google is getting bloated and broken (literal string "searches" in google search, fo example), I may as well disburse my online data to multiple places so no single entity has a full picture of my online behavior. I now can vote/comment on youtube without having those things tied to my identity (WTF, Google. If I didn't explicitly sign onto Youtube, don't fucking associate my gmail identity with Youtube!!!).

Anyway, I'm not trying to be hip or edgy. I just finally got tired of Google's feature creep and identity wrangling. So I switched to inferior competitors. Hasn't been too painful, though.

The one thing I'll keep a "real" identity presence on Google's services is "talk" just so I can converse with the few contacts who desire that venue, pretty much making that account similar to my token Yahoo and MSN accounts. I've managed to create a fake identity solely for my Android phone so I can get apps from Play.

While I am curious about Google's future, I've decided that I no longer want to be a part of it.