Yesterday while I was playing around on the internet I decided to give Xoopit a whirl. It’s a very slick plugin, extenstion type thingy for gmail. It indexes all your email to find photos and file attachments and gives you a better interface to browse and manage those attachments. It has already helped me find a file attachment that slipped through my mental radar. Xoopit has other little hooks into search and social networks. I think it will be an absolutely fantastic productivity ehnancement.
 
But I was extremely nervous to use it. why? You have to provide Xoopit with full access to your email – give ‘em your password. If you’re like me, you have a ton of very sensitive info in your email, both personal and professional. Just handing that over to someone is scary. Then I paused and thought a bit more. Well I’ve already done that though haven’t I? I’ve given it all to Google. In many ways the way google uses all my personal and very private information is even deeper than Xoopit appears too. Google actually reads it all and gives me contextually relevant ads related to the content it sees in my email.
 
I don’t know anyone at Google, yet I trust them with the some of the most sensitive and private info in my life. So WTF, why wouldn’t I just hand that all over to Xoopit too? Are they any less trustworthy than Google? Because they’re smaller? I actually figured that because they are smaller they are less likely to mess with my sh*t – so to speak. I guess you could say I’ve taken a huge risk by giving all that info to Google and it’s compounded each time to you give it another company. That would be true… but I did it anyway.