They're All Symbols

I think about all the different forms of electronic communication/information: text, e-mail, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, word processors, collaboration suites, etc., etc. But all these things are just ways to share information, via symbols. -characters (including numerals), in the case of text. Even images just symbolize real people, and other situations/events. Video is simply sequences of images (symbols). All of this is just information for sharing with others, or ourselves at a later date. Given that we are just dealing with pictures, words, and similar symbols, there is a finite set of things we generally can, or want to, do. So it seems unwarranted to have so many different services and software to do, largely, the same things. We share images and text via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, and many more. Facebook lets you broadcast text, images, etc. to groups of "friends", but also allows one-on-one communication. Twitter is mostly for broadcasting short texts, and receiving such broadcasts from others. Some do things the others can't, very well, but all deal with, basically, the same thing. I guess that is one reason I tend toward using Google services. In one place, I can do pretty much anything. Sometimes it seems like Google is trying to do too much, with all they are involved in. But really, most of it is really the same thing: information processing and sharing services. Calendars, video messaging, photo storage, collaboration on documents, etc. Google+ does something like Facebook. But I think it is better in terms of controlling what, and to whom you share with. -and much less clutter crap. You can "follow" people and groups, just like Twitter. If you want to share images (including video), etc., you just share a link to your Google Photos, or YouTube channel. You can collaborate on a text document, spreadsheet, slideshow presentation, etc. Google seems to be one of the best, in terms of seeing, controlling, and retrieving the data you have/share (Check out Google Takeout). All of these "free" services (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) are free, because they are using your information to help market products to you. They're all "selling" your information. But you can, if you want, open a Google Business account, for $5-$10/month, and keep your data more private. You can use things like boxcrpytor to encrypt things, before you even share them to such clouds services. Google has even made genuine efforts to help provide real e-mail encryption (which would allow not even them to see your GMail messages). There really doesn't seem to that many truly different information/communication services we really need. Google is not perfect, but it covers many of my needs, in a reasonable way.