[As an aside, I would also like to point out that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, observes that people aren't interested in privacy anymore, to which I have to reply, "Up yours, Mark!"]
Firstly, I've dumped Google Reader and switched back to Gregarius for RSS reading. Gregarius is more-or-less on par with Google Reader, except I can't share things with friends. It even has configurable keyboard navigation which is quite nice. Credit where it's due, Google Reader allowed me to dump my feeds as an OPML document which was easily imported into Gregarius, so the whole process took about 15 minutes.
I've used Google Docs as a simple, if limited, substitute for a proper word processor. Most notably, I used it to write my invoices. From now on, though, I'm going to be writing my documents in LyX, a wysiwyg LaTeX editor. Not only will I get control over my data, I'll have some of the most professional-looking invoices ever made.
I have a rather old and heavily used GMail account that I intend to migrate away from eventually, but I'm honestly pretty entrenched there. Even after I tell everyone a new address, I'll have to keep the account open just in case I get a mail from someone who didn't get the message. I have, however, set up a local search system for email (and even documents) that works quite well, so I won't have to use gmail for that. Friends, if you have bytex64@gmail.com in your address book, please change that to bytex64@bytex64.net.
And the biggest problem is, of course, web search. Google has had a stranglehold on web search for the past decade, and there really is no alternative that works as well as Google. There is Bing, and it's a pretty dire observation on how far Google has declined that I would even consider a Microsoft search engine with a silly name. There's also Yahoo, but in my experience it's just an inferior search engine. And truth told, they're all data mining my queries, so I may as well go with the best.
In other news, I'm experimenting with a new site design. I feel that the header of my site just has too much crap in it, and that it needs to be simplified. Take a look over at the beta site and see if you like it. In particular, try the menu that pops up when you click on the site name and see if it works for you. Yes, it's inspired by Vista/7's start menu. No, I'm not ashamed of stealing a good design.