Switch your personal domain to gmail for domains

Google Apps for Your Domain is a service that Google offers to individuals, informal groups and small companies that have their own domain name. The main attraction for using this service is for the email hosting. Most registrars and hosting providers offer good email services, but it’s hard to beat Gmail’s functionality, speed and flexibility. So having Gmail as the email service provider for your domain is pretty attractive! I use the service for davinciplanet.com and the more I use it the happier I am with the service.

Users concerned about the flexibility of the service like using email clients (e.g. Outlook & Thunderbird) need not be concerned because Google isn’t evil and they support it. Another concern has been the support of SPF records to prevent spam using your domain, but again, Google isn’t evil and so they support it:

• Configuring Outlook 2003
• Configuring Thunderbird 1.5
• Configuring SPF records

Besides Gmail functionality for your domain, Google offers other services like Google Talk and Google Calendar for your domain. Knowing Google, I am certain that they will soon include Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Desktop, Search etc. in the service.

Now, of course, Microsoft offers a similar service called Windows Live Custom Domains. In many ways they are a step ahead, like hosting Web sites for free (called Windows Office Live), however, I recently received and email from them saying that they were coming out of beta and so I’m not sure about the freeness going forward.

The one big issue with all of this, of course, is that Google (and competitors) have me nailed down because they can:

• Read my email;
• Know which sites and pages I visit (Google toolbar);
• Know who comes to my site (Google Analytics);
• Index all my documents (Google Desktop);
• Know what I search for (Google.com); and
• Kind of verify all of the above and do something addtional that I can’t even think of using Adsense and Adwords.

This guy has a great idea on how to handle this problem and if Google really doesn’t want to be evil then they should seriously consider it! It’s like SOX for Privacy (not the Red or the White ones!!)

Makes me want to like Microsoft again!

Filed under Internet Operations, On-line Services
Tags: GDP | gmail | google