I was using Google Reader today (Google’s RSS application) and went to share an item with a note to my friends, when low and behold, Google was tacking an ad to my note. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, nothing in life is free and Google needs to pay all of their great engineers that put out great products like Reader. But for me, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

I don’t like how much Google knows about me. I don’t like that they probably know what I’m going to do next better than I do. And now I ready to pay for software to read my RSS feeds and to hopefully maintain some semblance of privacy. At least one private company won’t know what I do with every single waking hour of my day.

Next up replace:

- reader with Vienna or Net News Wire

- gmail with ? (any recommendations on a good provider with exchange support?) 

- google calendar with ical

- google search with bing

- google docs with zoho

And I’m happy to say I’ll be able to replace Facebook with an open source alternative soon. Have you read about Diaspora yet? Looks like it’ll be available September 15th hopefully.