This weekend I migrated the haruska.com email services and google calendaring over to google apps for your domain. It is a service by google that gives you most google apps (email, calendar, docs) and they’re set up in a domain that you own instead of google. In other words, all of your email addresses are from your custom domain.

Up until now, I’ve been using dreamhost to manage my email. I have to say that they do not have a bad setup for self managing. However, if you want to move to web mail, nothing really beats the gMail interface.

For calendaring, my wife and I were already using google calendar to manage shared appointments so this just brought them under the same domain. We’ve also started to use the google documents a bit to share and collaborate easily. Moving to the google apps for your domain just made all of these features located in one place.

I’ve already ran in to some issues or downsides with the move. I already had a google account with my primary haruska.com email address for calendaring and docs. This seems to confuse the google servers and it asks you to change the email address of the old google account. It would be nice if google could just recognize they’re actually the same. The same is true for the blogger account I had. Things don’t seem to be totally unified in login. Blogger isn’t available on “your domain” accounts, so you have to keep a separate google account for these extra apps if you want them.

However, overall I’m happy with the switch so far. There are a lot of 3rd party apps for gMail and I’m not tied to the IMAP / WebMail solution from dreamhost. This is just part of the overall trend of migrating more and more of my apps to the web browser.

I was wondering how everyone keeps their content and social networks straight online. I have a profile on LinkedIn and am probably joining Flickr soon to share wedding and honeymoon photos. I originally set up Gallery, but uploading the pictures to Flickr makes the photos that much more valuable to friends and family. This is similar to having a LinkedIn profile vs. just posting your resume on your personal website.

I’m not the first to say this, but I think this is where it is going for the average user. Give up control of your personal online “presence” to other companies that do it well. I should probably get a FaceBook network together while we’re at it to keep in touch with personal contacts to go along with my professional contacts at LinkedIn. When I get in to video, why not a YouTube profile to go with my Flickr profile? Why manage your own ramblings, when Blogger can do it for you?

Also, with Google’s tools for your domain, why not just let Google handle your email, documents, and calendars? Moving off the desktop to the web could be liberating at the cost of losing control of your data. Does it matter?

Next, I need a site that is just an aggregate of all these other sites in one place. Maybe that’s what haruska.com will become.