This blogpost sums up big chunks of the reasons why I set up dosch.it as a blog in the first place.
Now my calendars, contacts, and backup files all sync with a free-and-open program called ownCloud, which McClelland maintains on the May First servers. None of that information about me churns through Google anymore. OwnCloud is like an adolescent lovechild of Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts—plus whatever other apps people create as plug-ins. A hobby of mine is trolling programmers on Twitter to get them to make more.
Source: The Pleasure of Do-It-Yourself Slow Computing | The New Republic