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Google Tests Multiple Account Login
tekgoblin noted joyous rumors for anyone forced to use multiple Google accounts "Wouldn't it be great if you could log into all of your Google accounts at the same time if you have multiple? Well it seems that Google may be implementing a way to do this in the near future. Right now it can be done with scripts such as a Greasemonkey script, but that isn't as easy as
Google doing it for us.
The people over at Google Operating System have had users submit a screenshot of what looks like a beta test for multiple account login. It appears that it will be available for Calendar, Code, Docs, Gmail, Reader, and Sites for the test but surely it will be across all Google apps when it's released."
Fuck you google
I've really been waiting for this!!! the script solution is kind-of buggy... Please release this for Google Apps fast!
:-)
TIA
Get all accounts pwned at the same time too?
Wouldn't it be great if you could log into all of your Google accounts at the same time if you have multiple?
Who has multiple google accounts, and for what?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I have lots of email addresses, but I be sure to spread them around. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are the ones I check frequently.
I wouldn't want to put all my eggs in one basket, you know?
Being able to link all your accounts to one person (you) is fully in the interest of Google.
we started doing this 3 weeks ago when youtube began offering synchro for gmail accounts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Even better, why don't they let you merge accounts? It's a pain having separate accounts for different applications. (I can't remember how I got into this mess!)
To my dream of simultaneously logging into a googol Google accounts.
I see no reason for my news reading to be linked to my Youtube account and then linked to my Gmail account and my browsing habits - I'd rather keep them separate, thank you.
Google keeps asking if I'd like to link them, and I want a "No, and don't ask me again" button to check.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hotmail has had this for years. Very convenient. I'm frankly disappointed at Slashdot Editors for thinking this tiny feature is news.
....looks like this still isn't the year of the linux desktop :'-(
I have two accounts: 1 personal, 1 business -- I just launch an incognito mode window in Chromium and everything has worked fine so far. Definitely a reason I love the Chromium-style ease of incognito mode windows versus Firefox's either-or style.
... where Chrome itself allowed you to do this across any website.
Chrome used to have an Alternative User Account system that seems to be nuked from the current versions, unless it has been hidden behind YET ANOTHER FLAG. (seriously Chromium devs, make a god damn about:config page!)
This feature was incredibly useful for signing in to multiple accounts that can't be emulated with Incognito mode.
Personal example being Public account for any old crap, private account for friends, and business account for banking, shopping, etc.
I was really happy that someone else out there decided that it wasn't stupid to have multiple accounts with web browsers and actually have visible options for it, unlike SOME browser developers i won't mention...
But apparently it isn't important to web browsing, apparently it conflicts with Google Simple Is Best philosophy... bullshit, complete bullshit.
Simple is NOT best, simple DESIGN is best. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having complex settings hidden away from users (about:config, hey hey?), but Chromium takes it even further and forces you in to making a huge mess of flags in shortcuts...
n/t
The account limits to infinity and beyond so that I don't have to Buzz around from account to account to avoid current silly ceiling limits.
Use Firefox and create multiple profiles. You will have a window for each of your Gmail accounts. http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles
Google sometimes 'locks down' your account for up to 24 hours, due to various criteria that aren't very well specified - e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=7226841f0bdafc8d&hl=en - hence it's a good idea not to have all your eggs in one basket.
It has also been known for Google to disable accounts - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-has-disabled-my-gmail-account/7871/ - for no clear reason. Of course, if you pay for Google Apps premier edition, you do get a support phone line for this sort of thing.
I have approx 3 google accounts, 2 google apps accounts, many client google apps accounts & i have a few scattered legacy youtube accounts etc.
I guess it would be nice to be able to switch easily but I'm not sure how they are going to do it elegantly.
Right now the best option is to use IMAP and bypass the complete web interface.
This must be why I have to log in again every time I load the page.
I have been after this feature for a while though, nice to see it arriving.
...these aren't my real teeth.
Google offers to host business mails, etc. on its own batch of Google Apps.
Business have out-sourced their employee's mails & calendars to Google,
Schools have out-sourced their students data to Google
Service providers do that for mail and contacts too (My mobile phone does it).
So people can end up having several different accounts on Google and wish to have a way to connect to all of them at the same time.
I would be grateful if I could use my GMail contacts list (that I've been using for years) with my Mobile phone company free SMS sender (that was recently remade as a iGoogle widget on their own Google-outsourced portal).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...blah
Maybe the reason why I own multiple accounts is that I don't want them connected, either for security or privacy reasons.
So yeah, I'll pass on this.
I don't want any bleeding across of these groups, so I've even created separate Firefox profiles for each one.
If that's not a sign of OCD, my name is Cowboy Neal.
I have 2 active Windows Live accounts, one for school and one for personal use. I can switch between accounts simply by clicking the username on top-right corner.
To me Google just *learned* something nice from competitors.
You can already link you gmail accounts (forwarding) and calendars (sharing). It seems like google is just looking to make it easier for everything else as well. The biggest difference I see is linking different groups of contacts. It will be easy enough to differentiate based on tagging.
There will be no encouragement to force you to link them, because places like my university, that uses Google Apps, will definitely want to control authentication to our stuff, and let you do whatever you want with your own.
There's already a useful page with radio buttons, when Apps get confused about what you are trying to connect to, it pops this page up and asks which account you are trying to connect with.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I've got Blogger blogs with various identities, and the comment moderation messages all forward my main gmail account, but I have to log out and log in as another identity (or do it with a different browser) to approve/reject the comment.
Simultaneous multiple login would make this much easier.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
What I want to do the most is tie my free google account closer to my google app account. Why would I want multiple normal google accounts? But I, like many started off with a normal one and then opened a google apps account and realised there is not good easy way to check both in one place.
Even now, I made the "mistake" of opening an app engine account with my normal google account. I'm starting to polish off my site and want to use a domain name. So I went to the control panel, click the appropriate button and it tells me to open a google apps account. Yes I can remove app engine fro my normal account and open one for my google apps account but why should I have to?
Why does there seem to be absolutely no community pressure for google to provide stronger authentication and account recovery features? The fact that google provides fantastic free products does not diminish their responsibility to mitigate the damage done to their clients by account hijacking. I think that anyone who knows somebody who has had an account irretrievably hijacked will understand this sentiment. If you are doing anything intensely personal or sensitive with gmail, you are an idiot. Too bad the vast majority of the public doesn't understand that if their account gets hijacked, it is game over, and google is completely non-interested in assisting the user to recover the account.
Never shall my "regular" account and my "porn" account meet. That's the whole point of having a separate porn account. Duh.
Those who have university Google Apps accounts already can do this. My daughter can log into her regular Gmail account and her university Gmail account simultaneously so obviously Google has had this figured out for a while. I know they have have different URLs but that's not what allows it; it's really just a matter of fixing the cookies to make this happen. I sure as heck could use this and would all the time.
Now I can stalk my ex's email without logging out of my own
Hmm, I have no tried to use it with different google mail accounts, but I use it with two corporate accounts and a normal private one and I have no problem. I do this in Safari, Firefox and Chrome without any problem. So what is new here?
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I was an att.net webmail business user (my philosophy is, you get what you pay for) but AT&T discontinued its in-house webmail service and dumped me onto Yahoo Mail, an email service for children. The first change was that I can't view more than one email account at a time, I have to log out and in and out again. Drives me nuts. Now I either have to put up with Yahoo's incompetence or change my email address that I've had for years. Good to know Google, at least, respects its users.
At least with Google Apps accounts, I have been doing this for about a month, now. And yes, it's nice.
Complete pain in the arse.
The only way that I could get into my YouTube without agreeing (explicitly or implicitly) to merge the accounts (which I really didn't want to do) was to visit a GA page and explicitly log out first, and then go back to YT.
I haven't visited YouTube for a while. I really liked the core product, and used to use it a lot (as did everybody else), but then they started forcing me to go through a nag screen every time I visited to try to get me to localise the account to "improve my experience" and find "more appropriate" material for me based on locale. I didn't //want// search localisation, I //like// the fact that the internet is global, and I wanted to be able to see science/geometry videos ranked independently of their source country, so I always used to click the "no thanks" button.
And every bloody time I came back, they'd ask me again. And again. And again. And it really began to bug me. YT was a site that I used for fun, and the nag screen was turning every attempt to access that fun into an annoyance, so after a while I simply stopped using YouTube unless I had something specific to look up. Corporate-level optimisation strategy meant that for me, the parent company managed to wreck what was otherwise a great site, and stop me visiting.
Yesterday's experience was even worse. It was Google trying really hard to twist my arm to get me to agree to something that I didn't want to do, to the extent that I was effectively locked out of my YouTube account until I agreed, or until I logged out of my Google account to avoid triggering the "Do you want to merge now or later?" page.
From a consumer POV, this is crap behaviour. If Google users want a more Google-integrated video sharing page, they already have one. It's called GoogleVideo, and it's not hugely successful, partly because a lot of people prefer the more focused YouTube approach and branding, and they prefer sense of independence that YouTube managed to hang onto after the takeover.
I like Google, and hope that they continue to do well, but some of their executive people don't half do some stupid things sometimes. I worry that Schmidt may have his eye on Facebook's success, and see Facebook as a role model for integration, while forgetting that Facebook's history has included episodes that weren't just morally dubious but downright illegal. Facebook's business practices are almost exactly the sorts of things that Google's "Don't be Evil" motto was supposed to keep Google safely away from.
And yes, the advertisers probably love Facebook, and the anti-FB protestors haven't managed a mass FB boycott ... but Google don't have a Facebook/Apple/MS-type business model with customers that are locked in by their investment. Plenty of people who loathe Microsoft still use MS products on a daily basis, and plenty of people who dislike aspects of Facebook don't leave, because it's now their social network hub.
The Google products (apart from Android) don't have that same corporate lock-in, and that's one of the reasons why people like them so much -- knowing that you can leave Google at any time means that it's the safe default option. You can export your calendar details out of GCal at any time, and to switching to an nearly-as-good search engine takes seconds. Google have to stay sharp, and liked, because they're constantly living on the edge of the abyss.
So ... all it takes to "break" Google is for some daft executive to enviously eye up the sort of heavy-handed corporate playbook strategies that have been so financially successful for MS/Apple/FB/Yahoo/AOL, and say, "Well it makes a l
Eric Baird