Tech Speak: I Want To Move My "House"!

Each person has made a statement of them in the cloud. Some people have online profiles, some have Facebook account (ok admittedly not every person has Facebook), some have blogs and there is something that I'm sure most if not all have - emails. I'm sure for most of us Singaporeans, our email accounts are also linked to our messenger service, namely mainly MSN or Yahoo. When we were younger, we didn't have so many contacts, and our messenger contact list was few. It was easy to say "i want to change my email" on a whim. I mean, personally, I've changed my email like 4 times? I have been on my current one for 4 years odd now. It has a contact list of 400+ people, my messenger service has many contacts as well. I suddenly have the feeling of changing my email. But it's hard, I shouldn't and I can't. Just change it, you say? It seems like it's just emailing 400+ people about my new email, export my current MSN messenger contact list and import it into my new one. Tada, all done.

No, if only it is so easy. I have many web services linked to my email. I realised that many of those web services do not allow me to change my email address. Personally I find that ridiculous. My email now acts like my passport. Even for those which I can change my email, there's too many services and I can't even remember some. Though some say that I might as well just abandon those web services since I can't even remember them, but hey at least my browser remembers the login name and password and I can just login if I ever come across them again.

Actually the bulk of the problem is due to the Google Products I am using with my Gmail. Since I am a faithful user of Google, I use plenty of their stuff. It'll be hard to backup every single one of my 3500 Gmail messages. I have no idea how to move my blog over. My Google calender is totally filled with birthdays and appointments. My Google Contacts has 400+ people. I have 31 documents in my Google Docs. I have a halfway done website under Google Sites. My iGoogle homepage has 40+ gadgets and 6 tabs with tons of bookmarks. My Picasa web albums have 29 albums, taking up about 500mb of space. My Google Profile is properly done. My Google Reader has 25 subscriptions. My Youtube has a ton of favourites.

Best of all, Google says "if you do not have a Gmail account under your Google account, you may change your username. If you do, it is impossible to change the username. You may however, sign up for another account." Are you nuts? And gosh, my username "techiewen" is taken up for Gmail. I guess I'll have to stick to this for a while longer.