That stupid news ticker: I used Adblock to get rid of one day 1. It’s there for one reason, to encourage you to be more active and give Facebook more data to use in targeting ads at you.

The new Profile page: It’s pretty, I’ll give them that. However, notice how so many of the specific things that they want to highlight in your timeline are events that present some opportunity to sell something to you. If you think that is a coincidence call me. I’ve got a bridge I’m selling.

Privacy Changes: All my privacy settings seemed to be ok, but there were lots of reports of unexpected sharing with the new and improved Facebook.

Frictionless Sharing: This is Facebook weasel words for the ability of entities to update your profile, without your active participation. Apparently, you don’t even need to be logged in to Facebook.

So, what do you do? You could delete your account. I’ve been thinking about it, but I really do like keeping in touch with people, and Facebook still does a fairly decent job of enabling that. So I’m not bailing. Yet.

What I am doing, effective today is this. I’m dedicating one web browser as my Facebook browser. That way Facebook can’t track me around the web, and I don’t have to worry about “Frictionless Sharing” telling the world that I just watched 10 Debbie Gibson videos. If you are a Windows person, you may have already tainted both Firefox and IE. So download Opera, and use it only for Facebook. Then delete every Facebook cookie in your primary browser.

The Debbie Gibson example was just a silly example, chosen specifically for its ridiculousness. I would never do that. I was over that crush years ago. Really, I was.

The mail interface on Horde is just fine. They do have an Ajax version, but they don’t have all the modules ajaxed yet, so the Ajax landing page can’t show your task list and notes, at least not in the version my provider has installed. It’s not displaying HTML email inline, but that appears to be a configuration issue with my provider, and not a bug in Horde. It works with Spam Assassin to filter spam, and it works great. I have Spam Assassin set up to auto-delete anything with a score of 7, and to filter to the spam folder anything between 2 and 7. I’m getting 1 or 2 spams a day that make it to the inbox. The mail app is full of nifty touches, like the “reply to list” option for mail from a listserv. That is something that even Gmail doesn’t have.

Mail

One really cool thing about Horde is that the portal page can show your unread mail count in each mailbox, your upcoming events from the calendar, your task list, and notes. You can also add weather, news, RSS feeds, etc. It’s pretty slick.

Portal

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The calendar module is perfectly functional. Again, not as slick as Google or Yahoo, but good enough. It does reminders, and you can subscribe to remote calendars. One thing that is lacking is that there is no mobile access to the calendar yet. They do have a sync module, but my web host does not have it enabled, so I have not been able to test it.

Calendar

The notes and to-do list modules are simple, but they do what they are supposed to do. And having everything visible on one web page is really very useful. One nice touch is that you can move or copy an email to the task list.

Horde is very, very configurable. In fact, I’d guess the options menu is probably overwhelming to most people. It pretty much is the default mail client that comes with just about all web hosting and email accounts. It’s also used by many universities. It is open source, the developers appear to support themselves by doing consulting related to large scale Horde implementations.

I don’t see any reason that I can’t be content using Horde as my primary mail and calendar interface.

Images courtesy of The Horde Project

I’ve also added a page to the web site where I’ll maintain a list of the web albums as they get added.

BTW, I’m not new to gThumb. It’s been my desktop photo manager of choice for a while. But I had never played with the web album plugin before this week.

The easiest thing to change was my default search engine. I’m using Duck Duck Go, and I have to say, I don’t miss Google at all for search. DDG has found a way to filter the splogs that clog up Google. I’m quite impressed by the search results from Duck Duck Go.

Phasing out Gmail is not so easy. I was in one of the first waves of beta invites for Gmail. I’ve had a Gmail account since back when that meant something! Also, Gmail is still the best damn webmail interface out there. The ODonnellWeb server has Squirrel Mail and Horde available. After a quick look, I decided to go back to an email client – Thunderbird. After a week back on Thunderbird I’m still not comfortable. So tonight I spent about 90 minutes poking around under the hood of Horde. I have to say, Horde is a pretty damn powerful tool, with decent enough calendar, and nicely integrated task list and general note tool. The preferences are somewhat obtuse, and it took a fair amount of searching for me to get simple stuff like filtering working the way I want. But I think it is set up ok now, so I’m going to give it a week.

I’m still using Gmail as my newsletter / web sigh up address, for now. I took a look at the new Yahoo Mail too, and I have to say I’m impressed. They have really improved it with the new release. Of course, Yahoo wants to do the same things that Google does, they just aren’t nearly as good at it. If you aren’t paying for a service, you are the product. I’m going to try to stick with stuff I’ve paid for, where I can.

I had an interesting issue today with Google + and Picasa integration. I sent a photo to 3 friends by emailing them the link from Picasweb. It is a non-public photo. Later I saw that photo and and a comment on it in my G+ stream. Only me and the three recipients could see it, but it was still a little disconcerting for it show up somewhere I wasn’t expecting to see it. I went as far as to check the random web user view of my G+ profile to make sure it wasn’t there. That got me thinking about bringing photos back to my server too. The reality is my photos at Picasa get few views and no comments. Zenphoto looks very nice, I’ll probably install it sometime soon and give it a test run.

So, this week I’ll be deciding if I can be happy living with Horde. If that doesn’t work I don’t know what is next. Maybe Telnet and Pine?