For the last few years I’ve been using Gmail exclusively and have been forwarding emails to @victortrac.com to my Gmail account. Google’s spam filters are the best I’ve ever seen, and the interface is elegant and fast, and combined with loads of storage and IMAP access, Gmail is nearly the perfect email application. The XMPP integration is just icing on the cake.

Because of these features, I voluntarily gave up having a customized email address on my personal domain to take advantage of Google’s infrastructure and technology. The decision was fairly easy - I was deluged in spam and GMail’s web client was better than any other thin or thick client available. By forwarding my domain’s email to my Gmail account, I was letting Google’s wonderful anti-spam technology work its magic. This allowed me to retain some use of my previous email address, but as I started to use XMPP (aka Jabber or as Google calls it - Google Talk) I became more and more dependent on my Gmail identity. Sure, I had other Jabber IDs, but it was just too convenient having a unified email address and Jabber ID provided by Gmail.

However, let’s say that in five years Google shuts down or, more likely, another company comes along and provides a better service or product. By this time your Gmail identity has evolved into a unified presence, communications, and identification address where anyone can reach you at any time and is also your OpenID login to the majority of sites on the internet. If you’ve spent 10 years building this identity around a Gmail address, you’re not in a great position to easily transition. By using Google Apps on a domain that you own and control, you’ve at least separated the address from the services and would be able to move around as you want. It’s like being able to live all over the world, moving to where the grass is always greener, yet still always having a constant mailing address.

Getting it all to work

For XMPP, however, the documentation isn’t very complete. According to this page, you need to add the following SRV records to your DNS server (replace gmail.com with your own domain):

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

The _xmpp-server._tcp and _jabber._tcp SRV records tell the requesting server to look at Google’s XMPP servers when there’s an XMPP request. There are two minor problems here:

There’s been a bunch of press lately about Google Reader’s new features, most notably the “Friends’ shared items” section and Profiles. A handful of people were instantly complaining about the lack of privacy and control, but I don’t really see Google’s implementation as a problem. It seems pretty simple to go to “Manage friends” and hide the contacts you don’t want looking at your shared items, but this really kind of defeats the purpose of using your shared items to begin with. If anything, I think Google’s decision to automatically include your GTalk contacts just makes it that much likelier that I’ll read and see my contacts’ shared items. I wouldn’t spend the time to go through my contacts to subscribe, but having them there automatically is great. It’s giving me the benefits of filtered reading list through a social network I wouldn’t have bothered to use otherwise.

However, I can see this causing some annoyance in the form of repeated posts. If a lot of my contacts are subscribed to the same stuff I’m subscribed to and decide to share it, I’ll see it twice - once on my own feeds and again when I go through their shared items. This has been annoying me on my Techmeme feed enough to want to consider unsubscribing from techmeme, and so I can see this becoming a bigger problem as I get more contacts who read the same stuff I read.

Whenever Google gets around to fixing the duplicate feed problem (and I really hope they do soon), they should also add an “Undo” button in Google Reader. In GMail, anytime you archive, delete, flag as spam, or otherwise move an email from one view to another, GMail gives you the option to undo the operation. This is great because Archive, Report as Spam, and Delete are all right next to each other and easily mis-clicked. Even if Undo wasn’t an option, it would still be possible to manually reverse the change.

What really annoys me with Google Reader is that there is no undo option when you click on “Mark all as read.” “Refresh” is stupidly directly next to “Mark all as read,” so I regularly end up clicking on the wrong button. The best you can do is switch over to the “All items” view and hope that you could skim through to see what you might have missed. Maybe I should take this as a blessing so that I can get through my feeds faster.

I’m a bit baffled why the smart guys at Google haven’t fixed these problems. Surely I’m not the only Google Reader annoyed by duplicate posts and the inability to undo a “Mark all as read” mis-click.

The Network is becoming more the Computer.

Google Map’s cameras caught this bug in the midst of an attack on Stuttgart. It also looks like it’s crapping all over the field. Crikey!