Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Ponderings on gmail, privacy and freebies

Yesterday I was dorking around a bit with ye old blog, browsing templates, seeing what goodies other blogs that I like have like stat counters, the creative licensing, etc. As I was looking around, I noticed that lots of bloggers use gmail addys, which makes sense since they can hold enormous amounts of data. I am all about one stop shopping.

I remember when google first announced about gmail. My initial reaction was "I don't freaking think so". What about my privacy? What happens if they fold? It kind of creeped me out. But I did some more research into it, and it really doesn't seem to invade my privacy any more than hotmail or yahoo does, at least for the ads that display in gmail. The whole "keep all my messages for the rest of my natural life", yeah that's different and not as nice, but you can't have it all. At that time I decided that it didn't really matter to me. So what? So what if advertisers see that I mentioned that my friend's new dog is named "baby" and I get ads for cribs and bibs? I generally don't like to share information on the Internet that I wouldn't want to be public... cause duh, nothing's anonymous. (Even my blog, which I would like to have anonymous wouldn't be that hard to trace back to me or at least figure out which schools I'm talking about... But for grins, we'll pretend that my blog is anonymous. )

Back to my point and reason for getting a gmail account: I was just damn tired of changing email addys fortnightly. At least it seemed that often to me. I want all my stuff in one place... and maybe it's not so bad that it is there forever. Because you never know, maybe in 20 years I'll need to contact someone I knew in law school... and I can search them in my gmail and get a hold of them... that is, if they have gmail too :) Twenty years would be a little much for anyone using aol!

I welcome other's opinions on whether gmail goes too far.

Oooh! I almost forgot. Does anyone use Picasa for their photo organization? It can host pictures up to blogger too, which appeals to me. Anyone, anyone?

BTW--Is anyone else entertained by the fact that blogger's spell check doesn't recognize the following words:
  • google
  • blogger
  • blog
  • blogs

5 comments:

Shannon said...

I'm curious why you don't want to share what law school you'll be attending. Just privacy issues?

Joey said...

I might after I make the final decision (rather, after Waitlist school decides they can't live without me). Right now, I'm just uncomfortable with sharing it. No particular reason why.

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