Why I'm Switching to Gmail

While I'm boring you with my personal IT, let me tell you why I am switching to Gmail:

• I want all my personal data accessible anywhere anytime. When getting a passport renewed, I had to get proof of travel and had to get it in 15 minutes. Kinkos two blocks away. Plopped in a credit card, logged into webmail for my earthlink account to find the recent receipt was no more. Was able to call the airline and have them email another copy, get it, print it and provide it by the deadline.
  
• Privacy concerns are overblown. The gravest concerns have to do with what Google could do because so little is explicit in their policy, especially as Orkut and Blogger are integrated. Trust and goodness is part of their brand, the world is watching and will iterate upon them if they fail us (notice I'm talking about them as though they are people, not an enterprise, their initial iterations are positive, and there is little chance of change of control). I'm more concerned with services that model me and my relationships without my permission or control.
  
• Its the best webmail app there is. Simple, usable and powerful. Not the best web app, because it bastardizes the browser, but best available.
  
• The user experience fits my usage model. With the exception of a couple filtering techniques, I have always kept my Inbox as a record of what comes in, Outbox of out and Sent as sent. Then relied on search and flagging instead of classification. If I wasn't on a Mac and occasionally mobile, Bloomba would be my ideal tool.
  
• Goodbye dialup account. I have kept a Earthlink account for dial-up while traveling and spam filtering via Brightmail. Would rather pay for 800 charges while travelling. I have confidence in Google's own anti-spam solutions over time, but we will see as I use it to filter my published addresses. The main reason for keeping this account was a persistent address so old friends can find me. Now I have an identity on the web and with social networking services I don't need address persistence.
  

There is another thing, I'm using email less than I used to. I don't consider dealing with spam using it. Most of my messaging has been offloaded into more efficient modalities:

• Workspaces for critical processes and productive groups
  
• IM, IRC and AVChat for on demand coordination and in lieu of calls (beware the interruption tax). Key to managing interruptions is a moderate buddy list, use presence at risk of being Busy when you are not, quick social gestures like "on phone" that people can understand or ignoring when absolutely needed -- otherwise, when I'm online I'M on.
  
• Public blogs for the big CCs, keeping up with the network and what used to be mailing lists (with only a couple of exceptions, and the quickest way to turn down email volume is unsubscribe from lists). Aggregator always hovers around 150 subscriptions.
  
• Social networks for introductions
  

Except IM, all of these modalities use the pull model of attention management. Even social network spam, I log in to process these more passive messages by choice. When people ask how I find time to blog, the answer is simple -- less email.

UPDATE: I disabled comments on this post because its becoming ripe with comment spam