Fuck! Google buys another of my 'life online' services

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I started with the following independent and quite fabulous online services to help me live my electronic life online. Somewhere to stick all my photo's, documents, websites and anything else I needed/wanted to store; these are my desktop apps all accessed via Netvibes
  • del.icious - website bookmarks
  • Writely - documents (think Word online and with collaboration)
  • Flickr - photo's
  • Wiki - KM info
  • Photobucket - photo's in a non-camera way
  • Remember The Milk - todo lists
  • iRows - spreadsheets, little that I use you gotta have somewhere to stick 'em
  • 30 Boxes - calendar
  • Blogger - blog, um, er, this page
  • Gmail - mail
  • openomy - file storage; not really used but bloody handy for the Word CV's during the job hunt
  • meebo - IM; MSN, Google Chat, Yahoo! Messenger ... all in one handy web site - I love this service

As of mid-November this set of services has contracted to 8 distinct services as iRows announces they are now off to Google:
I have no problem with any of these services moving to another company and probably the bigger the better BUT, what about me? What about my content? What about my choices? And whilst the iRows founders (Itai and Yoah) are now happily employed by Google they've not really left us users an exit strategy - except for 'open each and save as ...' - very naff!

Prediction for next to move to Yahoo! or Google (not IBM, Microsoft or MySpace) ... hmmm, either Remember The Milk or meebo. I see 30 Boxes having a quite distinct and focussed business plan that doesn't rely on being 'quite good at what they do and hope the big boys buy them' - in fact they're probably the only ones out there trying to really do their thing and change us. Photobucket is doing very well already thank you very much. openomy will (probably) just get swamped by next years announcements ... and the Wiki (Wetpaint) site will fade away as all other services become 'wiki-ised'.

If I had $1 to invest it would be with meebo as I just love how they have changed my IM'ing life - they are something I would love to promote and have everyone use.

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