Google's back, alright!

I didn't last a week. I gave dropping Google almost entirely about 3 days before I just had to go back. Google is a bit like crack (and food), it seems, and I just can't kick the addiction yet.

The biggest thing I missed were my personalized homepage. When switching to MobileMe, I switched to using Yahoo! as my browser homepage and dumped Chrome as well. iGoogle used to bring in my Gmail account, Google Calendar, RSS feeds and news to me in once place and it loaded quickly. When I stopped using Gmail and Google Calendar, this page became pretty bare and ugly so I stopped using it. Yahoo! looks nice, but it takes too long to use and isn't as personalized and interactive as iGoogle. The overall switch on my Mac wasn't as hard as I thought and the MobileMe integration with my iPhone and work Mac were pretty awesome.

Switching my iPhone over from Google wasn't a huge deal, for the most part. The calendar integration was similar but the contact syncing was great. I haven't taken the time to set up a Google-hosted Exchange account  to do this with my Google account, so the ease of doing this through MobileMe was appreciated. Battery life when using Exchange accounts is also dramatically decreased, from my experience. I did like the ability to be able to turn off automatic/push syncing of my contacts and calendar, so that they would only update when I ran the contacts app or opened my calendar. This really helped save battery life. Bookmark syncing was awesome. It made it incredibly easy to save something I found on my iPhone to my bookmarks and have it show up on my Macs automatically. I did miss using the GPush app to get pop-up notifications of new emails. The sound and buzz that MobileMe gave was easy to miss and forget about since there wasn't any sort of text-based notification. It's nice to be able to click my screen on real quick to see if I have any email when using GPush. Apple should build in email (and calendar for that matter) notifications on the lock screen, but that's another issue entirely.

Ultimately what it came down to was price. I was very happy with the MobileMe service and enjoyed the ease of syncing everything between my home and work Mac as well as my iPhone (and soon my iPad), but it costs money. Just last week my wife and I started seriously discussing saving for a home. We both really want to own our own place and stop renting and spending money on non-essential items like a MobileMe subscription isn't smart. Discounted subscription codes are available on eBay for around $60, but why not just use what's free? True, it would take about 10 years of MobileMe to pay for our new iPad, but we had already factored that in to our budget and will likely be one of the last major technology purchases for a while. When I consider the fact that we will likely be purchasing 2 new iPhones every 2 years, adding extra things like MobileMe on top of my already excessive technology spending makes it that much harder to justify.

CNN published a great article this morning about trading privacy for convenience. While I understood this trade prior to trying to leave Google, it kind of helped me realize that it may be okay to give up that privacy for the services they offer. Giving up privacy is a hard choice, but when you realize that so much of your privacy is already being given up unwillingly and without the return of convenience or free services it starts to feel like it may be more of a fair trade with Google. This may be a poor excuse for giving up even more privacy, but if you're already losing some to the government, law enforcement, and businesses (club cards, anyone?) why not take control and share only what you want for a service you want in return? As CNN explains, it's nearly impossible to comfortably live fully off the grid. If you're going to live a privacy-deprived life at least take control of what you can and trade it for great services that you enjoy using.