Last week, I attended a bachelorette party (long story) that was largely organized using my rarely-used Google email address. \u00a0Sure enough, a week later, I happened to go to the page for Google+ and there was this person being offered up as a new friend for my circles. \u00a0Didn\u2019t take much – just two or three emails back and forth. \u00a0There\u2019s no other contact I have with this person via Google and there\u2019s no other resource using her real name; in a social life mediated largely through Twitter, you are your call sign and that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing that I don\u2019t think I\u2019d really grasped: my non-work email goes through either iCloud or my family\u2019s mail server, pretty much across the board. \u00a0The Gmail account which I got ten years ago is largely a spam-stopper and a throwaway address, but there are a few folks still using it. \u00a0And for my own edification, I went down the line of my cellphone directory, and through my personal mail in recent days…<\/p>\n
Eighty percent of my friends and personal correspondents are on Gmail.<\/em><\/p>\n Not an exaggeration. \u00a0Google has your email, and as a result, Google pretty much has your life, unless you\u2019re one of these super-Millenial types who\u2019s never used anything for communication but SnapChat and WhatsApp. \u00a0Nowadays it\u2019s entirely reasonable that your phone would be the primary source of your personal communications, whether they be text or chat or email or what have you, but in the days of the dot-com boom and the first decade of the 21st century, go-anywhere email meant it was web-based, and from April 1, 2004 on, that meant Google\u2019s offering, with its clean UI and absurd 1 GB of free storage (now somewhere north of 7 GB last I looked).<\/p>\n Back then, there was no Beast of Mountain View. \u00a0There wasn\u2019t any iPhone vs Android, there wasn\u2019t any Facebook vs Google+, the great menace of the technology world was still Microsoft and Google was our friend and ally in building a life that didn\u2019t depend on the Beast of Redmond. \u00a0I mean, my God – Google\u2019s guys were up there at the iPhone launch talking about what a great implementation of Google Maps they had on this new device. \u00a0Then again, the Yahoo! guys were up there talking up their push email for the iPhone too.<\/p>\n How things change.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the fundamental problem: I\u2019m paying Feedbin for my RSS feed, Apple Maps is now good enough to use routinely, the default search engine on the iOS devices is Yahoo and there are plugins on the browser for DuckDuckGo and disconnect.me – as it stands right now, I\u2019m detached from Google\u2019s goods and services in everything except for the Moto X experiment (which has its own separate Google account from the one I\u2019ve had these last 10 years). \u00a0I don\u2019t need to use Google for anything. \u00a0But if 80% of the people I correspond with are using Gmail, that means that 80% of my mail is going through Google anyway. At that point, why bother?<\/p>\n