E-mail
I've been using Gmail as my primary e-mail for about a year, and although the "conversations" view takes some getting used to, I've come to prefer Gmail for organizational and spam reasons.

I decided that setting up an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) connection through another e-mail client was cheating since Gmail would still be working things on the back end. So Yahoo Mail got the nod for this experiment, since we use Yahoo Instant Messenger internally for communication across different offices.

There are loads of ways to set up free Web e-mail, so this is an easy switch to make. The only pain came in managing the overlap between the two e-mail systems, but that's mainly because I was getting a ton of e-mail from my real estate agent and mortgage broker and didn't want to confuse them by giving them a temporary e-mail address. Simply forwarding Gmail to the Yahoo address did the trick. While I suppose that's technically cheating, it was easier than trying to get house-related contacts to update their address books at a crucial time.

Mobile
As an iPhone user, you're locked into Google search as the default option within the Safari browser. (UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, you can switch to Yahoo from the Settings menu.) But both Yahoo and Bing offer iPhone apps for search, mail, news feeds, and driving directions.

Bing's iPhone app was key to a Google-free mobile experience.
(Credit: Microsoft)

Bing's iPhone app was very useful, with voice-activated search and precise driving directions that came in very handy in Lake Tahoe. The maps part of that application also has nice filters for searching for different kinds of restaurants and shops in a given area. I'd have to say I preferred the Google Maps aesthetic, but Bing Maps definitely got the job done.

Everything else
Because of the controversy surrounding the privacy options on Google Buzz after its launch, I had no choice but to break my pledge for professional reasons to stay on top of that experience. But as my Buzz followers (and Facebook friends) are aware, I'm not a big updater of social-media services in general and wouldn't have missed Buzz otherwise.

I completely and totally forgot that I was using Google Calendar synced with my iPhone and desktop iCal application until I was writing this story, so go ahead and ding me for that. Avoiding Microsoft Entourage--quite possibly the worst Mac e-mail/calendar client ever invented and the only one supported by our IT department--is definitely worth it.

YouTube was hard to dismiss. There's simply no other online video service with the breadth and depth of what is available on YouTube, and I was forced to pass on undoubtedly hilarious (yet probably fleeting) links sent to me by friends. Another difficult separation was from Google Reader: the Web-based alternatives I tried were much more buggy and confusing, although NetNewsWire's desktop application worked very well.

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