I love Google, I really do – they generally get it right, but I’m getting concerned.  I rely on Google for so much I worry that too much of my life is in one place.  And although the Ad’s they push are relatively unobtrusive, I’m starting to feel very much “watched”.  Like they know what I do, where I go.  Big Brothery.

So what are some good alternatives for Google services?

Search

How can we live without Google Search?  Let’s face it, they are the best.  Bing is ok, but I generally feel like I get what I want from Google faster than Bing, MSN or Yahoo.  There are a couple of good alternatives out there though that are worth a look.

• Scroogle
• Clusty
• ixquick

The best of them is scroogle.org.  Scroogle is a web search pluggin that does some really nice things.  It uses Goggle search but isolates you from the cookies that Googles writes to you , and doesn’t send your IP address to Google.  Most importantly, you don’t get any Ads!  As an added bonus, you get 100 search results per page.  Very nice.

Browser

I use several browsers – IE, Firefox and Chrome.  Chrome is usually the fastest, but I use Firefox more than the others.  A good open source Chrome alternative is Chromium.  It’s basically an open source version of Chrome.  The user interface is nearly identical, and it doesn’t track your info like Chrome does.  The home page for the project is here, and the latest windows build is here.

Google Calendar

There are loads of online calendars out there, MSN, Yahoo, MobileMe just to name a few.  I’d like to stay away from the big names – they aren’t better than Google and have many of the same privacy issues.  I’ve been looking at 30 Boxes (http://30boxes.com/) and so far I really like it.  The format is really nice, and it’s iCal based, so there are lots of ways to view the calendar (mobile devices, desktop, web) and there are tons of calendars to add in (holidays etc).  They calendar will send appointment reminders to your mobile device, and yes, there is an iPhone app.  I have not tried to hook it up to my iPhone calendar directly – would be great is that worked too.

This is a short list – just search for Google Alternatives and you will get plenty of reading material.  Other honorable mentions – OpenOffice.org, Zoho.com (very cool office tool, has email, CRM, project, docs etc).

BOOOO!!

reMail is/was a great email search app for the iPhone, and now that Google has purchased the company.  I have to believe this is strategic for Google and they will use the technology exclusively on Android phones, but from a consumer’s point of view, this sucks.  I hate it when anyone is proprietary about useful technology!

Another in a series of “Questions I Get Asked”.

This one is from my wife – she is an avid user of Google Calendar and Gmail, and loves Gmails use of labels and the ability to color labels any way you like.  She was quite surprised to learn that you can NOT color calendar appointments in Google Calendar in the same way.  That is, you can not pick a different color for each appointment in the same calendar.  I thought this was odd, then found out that not only was she correct, but also that this is probably one of the most frequently reported bugs/feature requests for Google Calendar.

So what to do?  Turns out there is a way around this, and although I think I’d prefer the ability to directly choose a color, this works pretty well.

In short, you need to create multiple calendars in Google Calendar , assign colors to them, then tag appointments to the color you want.  Sound complicated?  It’s not, and it works well.  Here’s what you do.

First, create a second calendar:

1. At the bottom of the ‘My calendars’ section on the left, click the Create link.
2. Enter the required information – name the calendar the color you want to star with, say Blue, for example.
3. Click Create Calendar.
4. Next, assign a color to your new calendar by clicking on the down arrow next to the calendar name and pick the color you want.  

Now you have two calendars, your primary and another called “Blue”

Now add an appointment (click anywhere on the day you are working on, or click Create Event).  On the details pop-up, simply choose the Blue calendar from the Calendar Drop down list, enter the event details and click Create Event.

 That’s it – you’ve just created and event and given it the color you want! 

You can add as many calendars/colors as you want.  Once an event is created, you can change the calendar (and its color) by clicking on the event, then choosing Edit Event Details, then changing the Calendar to any of your existing calendar/color combinations.

 Easy enough, right?  I like that you can add lots of colors or event groupings and move things around easily.  For more poeple, I think there are just a few categories events will fall into, so creating a seperate calendar for each is a very easy way to manage your buckets.

From the Gmail blog

One of the neat features of Gmail is that you can use it to aggregate all of your email addresses to one inbox.  You add the email addresses to your gmail account, and they connect via POP or IMAP to your other accounts and everything is in one place.  Until this past Thursday, when you replied to a mail that was not to your mail account, Gmail would put your main account in the “Sender” field so that your mail would not be kicked as spam.  What the recipient would see is a message that the mail was send “on behalf of” the intended address “from” your main account.  While this is ok in most instances, if you are trying to mask that Gmail is the tool you are using for all of your mail, then this can be annoying.

Thursday, Google introduced a way to route your mail through the SMTP server of your choice instead of their SMTP servers, so your mail will look like it is comming from the system you choose and the “on behalf of ” messages will go away.  Neat!  If your office allows POP/IMAP and you allows remote SMTP then you are golden.  If not, well then you have to live with the “on behalf of” messages.