Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

From 1995.

diaspora /dī-ˈas-p(ə-)rə, dē-/
origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]”
1. the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network

Interesting, in case you haven't heard of it.

Also worth considering: We charge $99 per year for a MobileMe subscription. Google gives you the same stuff and all they ask for is, um, permission to totally invade your privacy and to “monetize” (God I hate that word) your personal information. You think your personal information is worth less than $99 a year? Then you’re getting a hell of a deal with Google. The rest of us would rather spent $99 and keep the contents of our email to ourselves.

All my credit card statements, software licenses information, electronic receipt, password reminder, everything, goes into Gmail.

Maybe it's a good idea to ditch gmail altogether, for a system with better privacy. But not MobileMe, I've read some bad experiences with that. And of course not the rumored facebook mail. Maybe I could roll my own email server somewhere?