I pretty heavily rely on Google for a lot of things. I half-heartedly use them for e-mail, in that I use my gmail account or some throwaway things (their spam blocking is quite good, actually). I use Google Browser Sync to keep my bookmarks synced across all my Firefox installs. I use iGoogle as my default start page in my browser. And I use Google Reader as my RSS aggregator (which also lives in a box on my iGoogle page).

I really like Google Reader. Which is why my heart sank when I looked at my iGoogle page yesterday to find it reset to the defaults. Then, checking Google Reader, discovering all my feeds were gone. Luckily, it was only a temporery outage, but it got me in a bit of a panic, because I didn’t even remember which feeds I was reading. Some of them update very infrequently, and I relied on Google Reader to let me know when that happened.

I was going to switch to using Safari or Thunderbird for RSS, but I realized that a local solution didn’t work — part of the beauty of Google Reader is that I can access it from any of my computers. I can even read it from my phone. It’s quite handy.

Compound this with the cases I’d read of Google losing entire GMail mailboxes, and I realized I can use Google, but I shouldn’t rely on it. Because this is a free service, I don’t have any sort of recourse should these things just go away. Even with a paid service, the best you can hope for is a refund. Google needs this stuff to work for them in order to maintain their business model of revenue through advertising, but when I’m one of a vast number of users, I’m as significant as a bug.

So I’m taking steps to cover my ass — I’ve copied my subscriptions over to Bloglines, I’m exporting my list of subscriptions from time to time. And I’m going to make sure that any mail I have on GMail I don’t actually need.