This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+.
Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google.
Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"?
If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.
I find it incredibly convenient not to have to log into drive, gmail, maps, youtube, etc. separately. They all work seamlessly together, and I know I sound like a shill for saying so, but I've had nothing but positive experiences with it.
I see the convenience, but that only works if you're willing to bare your soul to Google. If you want to have one identity for YouTube, a different identity for Gmail, and don't want Google to know where you are via Maps, that becomes much more problematic.
I wouldn't quite say I've "bared my soul to Google". I slowly signed up for those services as they became available and now I only have to login to one of them to use them all. If I don't want Google to know about me for something I just open an incognito tab.
If you have multiple google accounts like the gmail website in a browser on a PC, you can switch between them by just choosing the account from the google accounts menu. Tremendously convenient. Google can have my figurative "soul" for this.
Comparatively if I have to switch between my twitter accounts, it's way more convoluted than it needs to be on a PC/browser. Still, it used to be much much worse when going to their login page gave you a redirect to their app download page. It used to take me ages to locate a workaround.
Chrome has had this feature for years. You can create separate Profiles for YouTube, Gmail, etc. I do this with Facebook to minimize exposure to the Like Button virus.
Is there any way to stop this automatically picking up who I am when I log into GMail in the browser? I don't want Chromium picking up my identity just because I logged in once.
I wish they would just get it right, and let me create different accounts for the apps I want to use. I just want a YouTube account. No Gmail. No G+. No tying my adwords account to anything else unless I request it.
This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.
It's broken for me because I uploaded copyrighted clips to YouTube in 2006 with a username. When Google took over and linked my Gmail to YouTube and got serious about copyright, they banned me. So I have the pleasure of being able, as they seem to intend, to use one Google account to navigate all their services, except for one of the most popular because of petty offenses done in the early years of social media.
But we all know why they forced the unification of these accounts. So they can correlate our activity across services to "better serve us". (Read: serve us ads.)
Even if that is the goal (which is likely), it does not explain the need to force me to create accounts for applications I don't want, like Gmail. That's like going to a car dealership, buying a sedan and the dealership forces you to take five crates of crab apples with you at gunpoint.
It is more like a car dealership putting their dealership license-plate holder and the car make/model sticker on the back. And the crappy non-replaceable Navi system.
Honestly, the whole account "integration" just pisses me off. I want my Gmail account to be separated from my Youtube account and from the Maps account.
The main reason (by far) Google unified them is so they they can more easily track everyone across multiple properties.
> This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+.
It is a gmail account. Every time you are prompted to enter your google account, what do you enter? Yup, it was that simple.
> You're completely incorrect. You see how this actually is confusing!
This is historically inaccurate. I have never signed up for a Google Account and yet I have one.
Before Google+ and Google Apps existed as concepts, people had GMail accounts. Then along came other Google Apps, and GMail accounts were upgraded to Google Accounts which could do more than just GMail.
Fast forward a few years, and Google+ comes along, and confused the hell out of this even further.
Hmm, not sure exactly what you're saying but if it's that Gmail accounts came first and then the ability to have accounts without Gmail then you're incorrect.
Google had products that required accounts way before Gmail came along. Adwords started in 2000 and I think Google Groups started in 2001. I'm pretty sure I personally remember having an account for Google Groups before Gmail even existed, but I could be wrong.
I'm also certain I had a blogger account with Google back in 2003 sometime and Gmail didn't come along until 2004 for an April Fools day joke I think.
Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google.
Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"?
If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.