kenkinder's comments

You can change the timezone on the web GUI, but that's just the offset. The issue is that CalDav PUT requests included a timezone, which the server just discards. You can try it yourself. Setup OwnCloud with Lightning or something. Create an event and specify a timezone in the event itself. Close and reopen the app, or use another app, and you'll find that OwnCloud simply truncates the data and stores it as UTC with no adjustment.

I can drink a glass of water and forget about it. Water is a commodity. Email is not a commodity.

If you use gmail, that becomes your online identity. It's hard to switch. If you use your own domain, you can switch providers without changing addresses, though not without hassle. But switching away from that gmail.com address? It's more than just giving out a new address -- I'm sure that in 1 year, I'll still be getting email at gmail.

So that's the difference. With email, you need to plan way ahead. With water, you don't.

I skipped over that because there are actually pretty straightforward choices in Play Store. I switched to BeyondPod, but I'm hearing good things about AntennaPod.

The software is KDE (Akonadi), Thunderbird (Lightning), and a few small utilities. It seems probable, though not guaranteed that Lightning will keep working. But I don't want to bed the farm on that, I doubt KDE will be supported, and I'd really rather just use a calendar that faithfully implements the standard instead of whitelisting the standard for certain clients.

In terms of XMPP, I checked yesterday. After updating the Android Talk app to Hangouts, all of my XMPP contacts disappeared.

In terms of email, using Google Apps on a custom domain would avoid lockin and actually not be a bad choice, at least for now. I went with Fastmail anyway, and I think it's just a better service.

I seem to recall it not offering things like CalDav and CardDav.

It's definitely being actively developed.

Hm, I thought it did. Perhaps it used to. Thanks for the correction.

In terms of features, Fastmail does not do a good job of advertising its features. Just sign up for an account and check out the settings page. Its filtering is quite powerful, there's a SOAP API, and you can do stuff like automatically sort mail into folders. Eg, you could do [email protected] and have it go into a "bestbuy" folder.

As the OP, let me respond.

I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'm only looking to migrate off Voice because it's not going to be available. I was pretty perturbed when all of a sudden, anyone I ever emailed appeared as a pre-approved contact on Talk.

So, it isn't about Google being evil or not. Google has a responsibility to its shareholders to make money, and I trust that they're trying to fulfill that mandate as well as possible. In doing so, they've shifted their portfolio of properties into a closed ecosystem that does not appeal to me as a consumer.

At this point, I imagine most alternatives suck because there's really no point in going up against free and awesome. Case in point: Reader. Reader really was awesome, and it had no competitors because no one would bother competing with it.

I imagine that as Google does offend more of its users, some competition might heat up, but I'm well aware that for most people, none of this matters in the slightest. It's a narrow cross section of geeks who notice or understand any of this.

I'd be willing to pay something on the order of ~$8/mo for what Google Voice offers, especially if you added better filtering and an API. But I wouldn't pay more than my cell phone bill.

I would think the service you move to would need your friends list in order for you to be able to communicate without re-authorizing everyone.

Since I didn't have Talk set up on my own domain, I'm SOL on that front. I just have to get everyone to re-authorize me.

I had been thinking of that, though Twilio's pricing would probably be prohibitive. They actually charge more than my cell provider for minutes. But everything you'd need is right in the API.

OP (as in the site) here.

It's not my certificate, it's your browser, which I assume is Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP? You're using a browser that does not support TLS, a cutting edge new technology that's over 10 years old. Get Firefox or Chromium.