Fixing the Google account alias problem | Hacker News Reader

Fixing the Google account alias problem

equalsdrummond.name

31 pointssuraj7 comments

Google has a real problem with account management right now. That somebody has to grok all this to use Google's services is bizarre.

What's worse is that this doesn't even mention the third and entirely separate class of accounts - Google Apps Accounts. We use Google Apps Premier Edition and it boggles my mind that to this day, Google does not allow Apps users to log into the majority of Google's products with their Apps account. sigh

Agreed. Every app seems to have a slightly different authentication/authorization/identity model. Docs works differently than Analytics, works differently than Ad Manager, works differently than Feedburner. I'm currently managing 3 "Google Accounts" right now to work-around these mismatched identity patterns and am using one shared Google Account to manage Feedburner, which has a one:one Google Account:Feed pattern (which really irks me). Webmaster Tools is also one:one but at least you can independently authorize multiple accounts...

The way this interacts with Analytics is especially confusing: if any of your "additional email addresses" have permissions on Analytics domains, the accounts get effectively consolidated.

Logging in with either my personal or work email was logging me into what looked like my personal account. It turns out that they both just defaulted to showing the same domain.

For added confusion, Analytics has its own built-in system for sharing+consolidating permissions across accounts.

It gets even more confusing if you have a Google Apps for Domains. I've had andrew@ducker.org.uk for my Google ID for a fair while before I got them to manage the email/calendar/etc. for ducker.org.uk - at which point calendaring got a bit complex for a few days - and it took me a while to get sharing set up again properly.

Some of this stuff really doesn't seem that well thought out, to be honest.

For the specific Docs problem mentioned, you can also just truncate the URL to not include the email address the doc was shared with, and presto, Docs will let you in. Only the shared secret matters.

The whole Google Account vs. Gmail account thing is confusing for people who never started off with Gmail. I did, and so things sort of "fell into place" for a lot of this very quickly on as Google started rolling out more features.

I suspect that the Google team expects/prefers that all Google Account holders are using a Gmail address as their primary email. I feel like that is the idea of the consolidated "persona" that the author mentions at the end of the post.

On a side note: the capitalized section headers of that blog are offensively large.

> You can use alternate email addresses to sign in to your Google Account, recover your password, and more.

Since a lot of us rely on Google apps, I strongly recommend if you use one - that your alternate email address cannot be compromised by weak password reset rules (e.g. a web email provider like HoTMaiL that has guessable secret questions). Ideally, you would use a more-secure email (company email that requires VPN and/or two-factor authentication).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com