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This QuickTip introduces a useful post about password management from Google.



Giving computer or password-management advice to people who don't have lot of expereince with IT or online services has always been challenging: there is a lot of background information that needs to be understood before it all starts to make sense. 

And teaching colleagues to use a mouse back in the 1990s was a lot easier than explaining on-line security is in the twenty-teens!  I know that I'm not the only person who struggled with explaining the difference between email and gmail to someone who just didn't understand "gmail is one type of software for doing emails" - he just kept asking "so what does fmail do?"

Google's have released a very carefully written article with advice about managing passwords. My guess is that lots of research went into working out exactly how much someone who uses a few on-line services needs to know, and how to explain it simply.

The article is here:  http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.ie/2013/05/helping-passwords-better-protect-you.html

They key points they cover are:

1. Use a different password for each important service
2. Make your password hard to guess
3. Keep your password somewhere safe (and yes, it's ok to write it down, provided you write it somewhere safe)
4. Set a recovery option

And of course the article has plenty of useful links to show you how to do these things for your Google account.

There are a couple of things that I would like to say a little more about.

How to identify your important on-line services

This is a very personal process, and may vary over time.

Google, of course, think that your Google account is important. But that may not be true for everyone. For most people, the important services are:

• Ones to do with money (on-line banking, AdSense, AdWords, other affiliate accounts, Amazon and others that you have your credit card listed with)
• Their primary email account - the one that you set as the password-recovery email for other online services.

After that, it's very individual. For some people, Facebook is important, while other people don't use it at all. Ditto Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. Job-hunting websites may be very important at certain times in your life, and of no importance at all in-between times.

Personally, I started deciding if passwords were "important" or not years ago: ones that are vital always get a unique passphrase, while lower-priority ones usually get an obvious variation on one password that I use in lots of places.

Keeping your passwords somewhere safe

The issues you need to consider here are probably wider than you think.

Most people plan to deter hackers and other malicious people. Keeping passwords in a paper notebook in your bedside table, not beside your computer, is probably enough to keep things safe from them. (Unless of course you are so famous that hackers might break into your house looking for your password - and if that's the case, you probably don't need to read this post!)

But it might not keep them safe from obsolescence - for example from becoming out-of-date when you change a password or set up a new account on your computer but don't immediately walk upstairs to update your notebook.

And it most certainly won't work if there's a fire in your house: your passwords will be safe, but totally inaccessible too.  And while it's easy to say that if your house burns down you've got more important things to worry about, for people who make their living on-line, losing access to their accounts could make things a lot worse.

Personally, I haven't worked out a good solution for this yet: it seems to me that it's some kind of balance between keeping password in safe on-line services (as much as any electronic "vault" is every really secure), and using a range of off-line options.

What worries you about managing your passwords?

This article describes Google's Inactive Account Manager, a new tool that gives you control over what happens to your Google account if you don't log on to it for a period of time.



Ages ago, I read a thought-provoking article on ProBlogger about making a "blogging will". His main aim was to ensure that his family could access his business assets (ie his blogs etc) if something untoward happened to him.

Now, Google's Data Liberation Front have annnounced a new tool called the Inactive Account Manager, which lets Google account owners say what should happen if they ever stop using their account.

This tool lets you decide

1. If and when your account should be treated as inactive
2. What happens with your data if it becomes inactive, and
3. Who else is notified, and what is said to them.

At the moment, it covers these Google tools - which are attached to your Google account:

• +1s
• Blogger
• Contacts and Circles
• Drive (which I guess means Docs too)
• Gmail
• Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams
• Picasa Web Albums
• Google Voice
• YouTube.

AdSense is a notable exception: I don't know what happens to your outstanding balance and income if your AdSense account becomes inactive.   But I suspect that it might be managed in the same way as a bank account or book royalties - and because each country will have different laws about managing estates and the like, it's not possible to let you "opt-out" in the same way as it is for regular data.

What situations is this for

There are a few scenarios that the IAM ("Inactive Account Manager" is such a mouthful) might be useful for.

Death / Serious illness or injury

The most obvious thing that you could use the IAM to provide for is if you unexpectedly die, or become so sick/injured that you cannot log in any more.

In this case, if your blog and other Google content (eg YouTube videos) is personal, you may or may not want family or friends to access it - and you may or may not want it to be deleted.

But if your blog belongs to an organisation or a business, it's quite a different scenario:   you will almost certainly want someone else to have access.

And if it contains material about a hobby or public interest topic, you may well want to have it transferred to some kind of "data steward" - or you may want your estate to manage it as an asset, if it is profitable.

Losing access to your account

Some people lose access to their Google account because they:

1. Set them up with an external email address
2. Lose access to that email address
3. Forget the Google account password
4. Cannot remember enough details to regain access via the forgotten-password wizard.

The IAM will only help these people if they have set it up, and if they (or a friend) still has access to the alternative email address they entered.   So it's not a universal cure for this problem, but may help a little.

Losing interest in your account

People's lives and priorities change over time.   The blog that was all-important ten years ago may now be a distant memory.   In this case, if IAM is set up, people will at least get a chance to think about whether they want to maintain what was there, or not

The best approach?

There is no "one right way" to use the IAM to look after your blog when you stop updating it.   It's a very private decision, and depends on what risks you think you want to cover off, and how you are using your Google account.

Personally, I don't think that losing interest or losing access are likely to happen.    So I've set up my IAM information to cover the first case, ie death or incapacity, and used it to send messages to carefully selected friends and relatives.  I could do more, eg include details about selling a couple of blogs that would be "assets" in the right hands, and send messages to the firm who would be looking after my affairs.   But it's a start - and as with so many "death and taxes" type of issues making a start is half the battle.

How to set up your inactive account information

Once you have thought about what sort of situations you want to deal with, then setting up your inactive-account information is pretty easy.

To start with, go to the Account Management option your Google account settings page.   Once you're there, there is an easy set-up wizard, which covers the following points.

Warning that you're in danger of becoming inactive

Google doesn't want your account to suddenly become inactive.   So they collect details are used to warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to an alternative address, saying that your account is close to becoming inactive. The current definition of "close" is one-month. Basically, this is your chance to stop the account becoming inactive by logging in.  

They ask for:

• A mobile phone number (which needs to be verified - so it must be one that you can access now)
• An alternative email address (which isn't verified - yet!)

Setting the timeout period

You need to choose how much time needs to go by without you logging in before your account is considered to be inactive. The default is three months, and other options are six, nine and 12 months.

Who else to tell

You can nominate one or more trusted contacts - ie email addresses that receive notification, and (if you choose, access to your data), once your account actually becomes inactive.



For each trusted contact, you need to give some message-text and also say which specific Google products they should get access too.



You can also set up an auto-reply to messages to your Gmail account, which is sent in response to all incoming messages after your account becomes inactive - or at most once every 4 days if one account sends you lots of messages.

What happens to your account:

Finally, you choose whether to delete your data once your account is inactive - the default value is "no", but you should change it to "yes" if you want to be sure that your blog etc are removed.

Confirmation

After you have saved your settings, you will get an email confirming that you entered.    (In my case, this message took several days to arrive - possibly because I get up my IAM settings fairly shortly after it had been introduced.   Hopefully it's got quicker now.

Limitations of the IAM

At the moment, IAM lets you set thresholds, notifications and actions for a whole Google account - there is no way to say that some blogs should be kept, and some deleted.

And there are still lots of things that we don't know about how IAM will work in practise.

• Do you get only one reminder - or one every time you reach the inactive-account threshold again  (ie every 3, 6, 9 or 12 months)?

• What happens if you're one administrator of a team blog, and your account becomes inactive with instructions to delete it - but there are other member or administrators who are still actively contributing?   (I would hope that the presence of these people means that your "delete" instruction is ignores, at least for the blog.   But I suspect that this won't be an easy scenario to provide for - and it's possible that Google haven't worked through all the options here.
  
  Ditto other shared resources (YouTube Channels, Shared folder/documents in Drive, etc)?  The dimensions will be different in each product, but the underlying problem is the same.

So while I think that IAM is a great idea, I'm also a little nervous about what problems it could cause if people choose to delete things without thinking through all the consequences.

And if you are going to set it up for your own personal blogs, then maybe now is a good time to transfer ownership of blogs that you made for clubs / societies / organisations / businesses to generic accounts being managed for them.


What other issues do you see?

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Related Posts

Understanding Google accounts

Team blogs:  letting other people write to your blog

Transferring blog ownership

Understanding how Blogger and Picasa-web-albums work together

Setting up AdSense for your blog

For Google Apps accounts, access to Blogger is controlled by the domain administrator.  This article shows why domain administrators may want to turn off Blogger access, for their domains - and describes how to enable Blogger access if required.

Blogger and Google Apps Domains

Previously I've described Google Accounts,  the difference between Google and Google Apps accounts, and the work being done to resolve conflicting accounts.  

People who have Google accounts can use Blogger by going to www.Blogger.com.   But for Google Apps account users, access to Blogger is controlled by the domain administrator.  There are reasons why domain administrators may not want their users to have Blogger.    But there may be times when it is appropriate, so this post shows how to enable Blogger access, too.

Why limit Blogger access:

• It doesn't feel like work:

Other Google products accessed with domain accounts can be set to use the domain-owner's logo.  So they look like a company tool, even though they're provided by Google.   This reminds people that they should only use the accounts to do things that are appropriate "at work".   But Blogger cannot (currently) be set up in this way - people who are using it may forget that they are using a work / organisation tool, and may be tempted to publish personal material using the account.

• Access control:

Firstly, there is currently no way to use Blogger to publish a blog that can be read by everyone using the domain, and not seen by anyone outside it.    This means that Blogger cannot be used for company businesses that should not be shared outside the company.    (The closest option in Blogger is to set up a private blog and invite people to read it - but there is a maximum of 100 invitations ever, and besides this option does open some security holes.)

• What happens when people leave

In well-managed companies, when a person leaves their domain account is deleted (perhaps after a month or two, in case they come back).    If someone has made a document or blog using domain account, and that domain account is deleted, then it's likely that the document or blog will be deleted too.   This isn't such a big deal for documents:  they can be transferred to other accounts.    But even though there is a procedure for transferring ownership of blogs, there are some items commonly found inside blogs (eg pictures, videos) that cannot be transferred given the tools that Google offer at the moment.

This article is about resolving conflicting Google and Google-Apps accounts:  an issue that is is going to start for people who set up a blog using an email address that is being moved to Google Apps.


Google accounts vs Google Apps accounts

Previously, I've described Google accounts and Google-apps accounts
As at October 2010 the two types of account were not the same, even though they looked similar. Therefore it was easy for one person to have :

• A Google account called Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com (because that's just any old email address)
• A Google Apps account also called Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com

The Google Apps account can only been set up when a new custom-domain was registered or purchased for AnyCompany.com  - or when the existing AnyCompany.com domain moves to Google Apps.

Joe should know about the Google account (assuming he's still actively using it).   But if he isn't aware of all the things being done in the IT department of AnyCompany, he might not even know that the Google Apps account was created when the IT manager was quietly testing options for a move to Google Apps.

 
Merging Google and Google Apps

In recent months the number of programs included in Google Apps has grown massively.

But to include the "older" tools like Blogger, Picasa-web-albums etc, they had to move to a new infrastructure.  To do this, they needed to fix up situations like the one described above, where there are two different accounts called Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com

The work to enable this has been done.  Organisations that use Google apps have been moved to a new infrastructure, which needs the apparently duplicate accounts to have been fixed.  

So, when this happens for AnyCompany, cleaning up the conflicting Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com accounts needs to be done.  

Google decided (I believe wisely - more about that later) that the two accounts will not be merged:  they aren't, and never will be, the same account.

Google have written about the conflicting accounts issue.  They say that the first time that Joe Bloggs logs into Blogger (or Gmail, or various other Google tools outside of Apps) after AnyCompany has moved to the new infrastructure, he willl be shown a special screen where he must rename the Google account.

[Even though Google' account transition process is now complete, it's likely that Blogger users will continue to see this request as the log into to infrequently used Blogger accounts in the future.   This is why I have updated this article now (June 2011), rather than deleted it.]


What to rename the Google account to

It looks like you can rename the existing Google account to any other text string that looks like an email address - and of course isn't already taken.   (Again, I haven't tested this yet, but it would be consistent with how Blogger works now).

Personally, I suggest renaming it to some other real email address that you control - ideally a new address that is just for the purpose. 

I don't think it will be possible to rename it to a gmail address, since creating the gmail address will create a Google Account, but in this case the Google account already exists.


Scenario 1:  Google account relates to the company:
If the blog(s) etc owned by the original Google account are related to AnyCompany, then one option is to rename it to Joe.bloggs2@AnyCompany.com.   This will work, provided there's not already an account with the same name.   But it may create issues (for the companies domain administrator) if another person called Joe Bloggs comes to work for AnyCompany in the future.

In general, if the Google account relates to company business, it would be a good idea to consult with the IT department to see how it shoudl be treated.   It's often a good idea to use a generic account name (eg blog.Editor@AnyCompany), and to simply hand on the details for this account when you leave the organisation.  That way, at very least the administrators of the domain will be able to get access to them because they'll control  the email address that matches the Google-account name.


Scenario 2:  Google account not related to the company:
If the blog(s) etc owned by the Google account are personal, or related to something other than AnyCompany (which could be AnySchool or AnyNonProfit, etc), then I would strongly recommend that the account is renamed to some valid address which is outside the control of AnyCompany, for example Joe.Bloggs@yahoo.com. 

You need to make sure you keep control of and access to the email address, so that you will continue to have access to the Google account even after you've left the company (or school, etc).



Combining the Google and Google-Apps accounts

Currently, Google don't provide any tools (that I know of) to let you combine accounts.  

Some Google-products (eg Feedburner) have tools to let you transfer ownership of items in them to another Google account.  But some products don't have any features like this.

Blogger lets you transfer blog ownership by giving another account administrator access and then removing yourself.  But unless you are certain that you can successfully transfer all the items in the blog (remember, Picasa-web-albums currently has no way to transfer album ownership, ditto videos, calendars, etc) you still need the original Google account to exist.   (You might choose to log into it with gmail and set message-forwarding and then never use it again.  That's fine ... just so long as you don't delete it.)

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Related Articles: 



Understanding Google accounts

Understand google-apps accounts

Transferring blog ownership

Setting up your custom domain

Auto-renewing your blog's custom domain

Amazon Associates and Blogger

Linking Blogs and Websites.

This article is about Google Apps:  what it is, how to access it, and what the account-names look like.   It discusses the great similarity between Google and Google Apps accounts, and looks at some of the small differences between them and how these relate to Blogger.


What is Google Apps?

Google Apps is a group of on-line applications and services that Google package together.  They are sold as a service to companies and other organisations, and people (individuals and companies/organisations) can use services on Apps for free, for up to 10 users.

You can sign up for Google Apps, using either a custom-domain that you purchased from another domain registrar, or by purchasing a domain-name (ie URL) through Google.

Also, people who purchase a custom-domain through Google / Blogger or Sites are strongly recommended to set up one Google Apps account to administer their domain with, and may create up to 10 user-accounts in the domain.  

Google Apps account-names are  groups of letters and numbers that look like an email address,  for example, Joe.bloggs@ACompany.com.

Initially Google Apps included things like:

• Docs (to replace MS Word etc)
• Spreadsheets (to replace Excel etc)   
• Presentations (to replace PowerPoint),
• Google-mail which looked and worked very much like Gmail in regular Google accounts - but was still different (to replace Outlook / Exchange) etc.
• Google Sites (for point-and-click website creation)

Today, many other software-as-a-service applications have been added to this list.

Google accounts vs Google Apps account

Initially, and until late 2010 / early 2011, a Google Apps account was NOT the same as a Google account, even though they appeared similar in many ways.  If an Apps user (even the domain Administration) wanted to use AdSense, Blogger, Picasa-web-albums, Google Maps, and some other applications from Google, then s/he needed to set up a separate Google account.

However since sometime in early 2011, Google Apps has been extended to include almost all the services that were previously available to Google accounts.   Effectively this means that now a Google Apps account is almost totally the same thing as a Google account.

To make this happen, Google had to resolve conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts.  This included asking owners of Google accounts with the same name as Google Apps accounts to choose a new name for their account.  They have also transitioned existing Google Apps accounts to Google, which has seen domain administrators get a flurry of warning emails.


Using Blogger with a Google Apps account

Today, if you have a Google Apps account, you can use it to log in to Blogger, Picasa, etc just like you did with a Google account, and you can do things like transfer blog ownership to Google Apps accounts.

The only exception is if your domain administrator has restricted your access to certain services.   For example, if your domain administrator has turned Blogger off for users in your domain, and you try to use Blogger with that account, you get a message like this:


It reads:

This service is not available
Blogger is not available for YOURDOMAIN.XXX. Learn more about Google products that you can use with YOUR-LOGIN@YOURDOMAIN.XXX.
If you are the Google Apps administrator, please read these articles to learn more about controling user access to Google Apps services and turning services on/off for certain users.
Did you use this product with a different Google Account? Sign out of your current Google Account and then sign in to the account that you want.

The only way around this is to ask your domain administrator to give access to Blogger (which they may be unwilling to do because it means giving access to all users in the domain, not just you) or to use another, different, Google account for Blogger.


Apps Security vs Blogger Security
Security restrictions that your domain administrator has set in Google Apps don't currently apply in Blogger.   For example, Google Docs may be set up so that only people in your domain (eg company) can see your documents.  But this if you create a blog in Blogger, this uses the Blogger security setting that you impose (under Settings > Permissions) - and by default it will be visible to the whole world.  This is why some domain administrators are not keen to enable Blogger for users in their domains.

(I haven't investigated, but it's likely that the same thing applies to other apps that were previously accessed via Google accounts not Google Apps accounts - eg Picasa.)

Other Google-account tools:
There are a few Google products that currently are not available using Google Apps accounts:

• Buzz
• Health
• Powermeter
• Google Profiles
  (NB  Blogger Profiles are available in the usual way via the Blogger Dashboard > Edit Profile link)

(ref:  http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=182213&hl=en&ctx=ch_b%2F0%2FServiceNotAllowed&p=blogger)

Again, if you want to use these applications, you need to use another, different, Google account.

Google Sites:
Some Bloggers use Google Sites, accessed with their Google account, to host files.

Currently, the Google Sites login screen that gives a choice between logging in with a Google Account, or with a Google Apps account, like this:


Despite this, if the Sites service is enabled for your domain, you can use your Google Appts account details to log in via the top, Google Account, part of the screen.  And if you choose the "Sign in with a Google Apps Account" link, the screen now asks for your email address (ie your account name), and simply puts it in the top part of the screen and asks for your password there.

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Related Articles: 



Understanding Google accounts

Resolving conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts

Setting up your custom domain

Auto-renewing your blog's custom domain

AdSense and AdWords - understanding the difference

File hosting options

Using a "foreign" custom domain for your blog

Transferring blog ownership

This article is about the issues involved in deleting a Blogger blog.

Before you start:

If you need help with deleting a blog, make sure you understand the words that are used to describe things in Blogger (ref Blogger, Blogs and bloggers, Posts Pages and Screens:  some basic definitions) - many people say "blog" when they really mean "post", and are then surprised when they follow some simple instructions and all their "blogs" (sic) disappear.

Also, make sure that you understand that your Blogger account is just a Google account (except for Blogger accounts created pre 2006).   If you want to "delete" a Google account (not just a specific blog), think about whether you really need to delete it as opposed to just never logging in to it again.


Deleting a blog:

If you own the blog and know the password of the Google account

• Log in to Blogger, using the owning account
• In pre-Sept-11 Blogger:  Choose Settings > Basic > Delete Blog.
• In post-Sept-11 Blogger (aka the new interface):
  Choose Settings from the drop-down main menu, then
  Choose Other from the left-hand bar
  In the Blog-tools row, click Delete Blog.

Only do this if you want to delete the URL (ie blog address) and not use it again.

If you want to keep the URL, then just delete all the posts (see the next sections).  If you want to give the URL to someone else, delete the posts and then transfer the ownership.

If the blog has an pictures stored in Picasa-web-albums, then they will not be deleted.  If you want to delete them, you need either manage them from Picasa-web-albums directly, or delete all the posts individually (not using the bulk-selection method) before you delete the blog.


If you don't know the password 

The first step, if you don't know the password is to use the the Forgotten Password screen, which asks for the blog's URL or the email address that you used to identify the Google account.

If that doesn't work, Google have some more suggestions for you.

The very last option, if nothing else works, is to take Google's Account Recovery Exam.  This attempts to re-connect you with the account using the email account that you had listed with it and/or any other security information that you (or Google) provided in the past.  

You will need to convince Google that you really did make the blog:  this could be difficult if you don't have access to the email address that you originally associated with the Blogger account, but it may not be impossible if you can answer some other security questions correctly.   There may be cases where this seems harsh or unfair, but it's necessary so that Google doesn't start deleting blogs based on malicious requests from people who don't own them at all.


If the blog belongs to someone else 

You cannot generally get blogs that don't belong to you deleted, unless the person who published it is willing to delete it themselves - the first step is to try asking them.

There are some exceptions, including:

• Taking action against a blogger who has used copyright material without permission, and
• Dealing with someone who is impersonating you or breaking Blogger's terms and conditions in some other way - in which case you need to use this workflow.

If the blog belongs to someone who has died 

In this case, Google have a special procedure which lets the person who is legally responsible for the blog-owner's affairs get access to their Gmail account:  once they have access to the Gmail account, they will also have access to the blog via www.blogger.com, so they can delete it as described above.

Note that this procedure requires the legal representative to:

• Have an email account themselves, and 
• Have received a email message from the deceased person, and 
• Send in a copy of the full message header from this email message.

So, thinking ahead, if you want someone to be able to access your blog(s) after you have died, it's a good idea to make sure that you've emailed them from the Google account associated with the blog - or give them some other way to access your password(s).


Deleting blog-post(s), without deleting the blog:

To delete one blog post:

• Log into the dashboard
• In the list of Posts for the blog, hover the mouse over the title for the post:  this lets you see links just underneath it for Edit, View and Delete:  click the Delete link..   
• You will be shown a summary of the post and asked to confirm the delete.

If the post contains any photos that are stored in Picasa-web-albums, you will be asked if you want to delete them as well.   If you do want to delete them, tick the check-box.   It's not automatic because these photos may be used in other blogs or posts as well.


To delete many (or all) blog posts, but not the Blog/URL:

• Log into the dashboard
• In the pre-Sept-11 blogger inteface:Choose Posts > Edit posts,
  Use the tick-box at the left of the post titles to select all the posts you want to delete
  Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Delete
• In the Sept-11 Blogger interface:In the list of Posts for the blog, use the tick-box at the left of the post titles to select the posts you want to delete.   (There are links in the top row for selecting All, Published, etc)
  Click the trash-can icon at the very top of the list, just beside Revert to Draft..   

The number of posts per screen is limited by a drop-down arrow at the top right, and defaults to (I think) 50:  if your blog has more posts than you are displaying (some of mine have several hundred posts), then you may need to do this several times.


Removing a blog from your Profile:

If you have a blog that you don't want to delete, but which you do want to delete from your Blogger profile, then:

• Log on to Blogger
• In pre-Sept-2011 Blogger:  From the Dashboard choose Edit Profile > Select blogs
  In post-Sept-2011 Blogger, from the drop down menu beside your email address in the top right hand corner of the dashboard, choose Blogger Profile
• Un-tick the blogs that you don't want to show
• Press Save Settings at the bottom of the page)

Deleting a Google account:

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Make sure that you are certain you need to delete the Google account:  in many cases, it may be safer to leave it in place, even though you never use it again.

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To delete your Google Account, follow the instructions on this page.

The page doesn't say what will happen to your any Blogger blog(s) that you Google account owns.   However at the moment it looks like the blog(s) are not deleted.  If you want to delete the blogs, you must do this separately (see above), before you delete the account.

If the blogs contain pictures from Picasa-web-albums, these pictures may be deleted.

And if the blogs contain items from other Google-hosted products (eg Docs, custom-maps), then it's likely that these items will also be deleted.

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Related Articles: 



Blogger, Blogs and bloggers, Posts Pages and Screens:  some basic definitions

Understanding your Google account

Taking action against a blogger who has used copyright material without permission

Components in your blog:  how the data is organised

Linking Blogs and Websites

Storing Pictures: Picasa and your blog

This article is about Google accounts:  what they are- and aren't, how to access them, and what the account-names look like.  This supports another article about the relationship between Google accounts and Google-Apps accounts.


Blogger accounts vs Google accounts

Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a tool on the internet called Blogger.   People created accounts on Blogger, and then used them to make a blog that was owned by their Blogger account.

Then Google (the company that made the search engine) purchased Blogger.   They wanted to integrate their products, so Blogger users had to change their original Blogger accounts to "Google accounts".  (Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but have recently said that this will stop soon.) 

At the time, very few people understood the difference between Google-the-company and Google-the-search-engine, so most didn't have any idea of the power and importance of these "Google accounts".   However as the other applications available through our Google accounts grew (Gmail, Picasa-web-albums, Google-custom-maps, AdSense, AdWords, etc), this has become clearer.


Getting a Google account

To make a new Google account, you just have to sign-up for any one of the products that Google offers (Gmail, Blogger, AdSense, etc).


The sign-up screen asks you to enter an email address, and says that it "(must already exist)".  But it does not check that the email-account does actually exist.

If the product that you sign up with is Gmail (which is where Google accounts started, I think), then it makes sense that the account name is the email address.

However Google (or perhaps even Blogger:  I don't remember) decided that people would use a text-string that looks like an email address as their Google-account name - even if the email address isn't a Gmail one, and even if there is no valid email account with that address

This means there are Google accounts called Joe.blogs@yahoo.com, and similar.  There are even Google accounts with a name that is not, and never has been, a real email address.  This has caused lots of confusion and problems:

• If the email address isn't a gmail one, then changing the password of the email doesn't change the password of the Google account

• Some people don't understand that their Google account name is just a set of letters: they don't realise that they can change the email address attached to their account without changing the underlying account (Dashboard > Edit Profile, identity tab).

• Some people lost access to the email address (eg because they leave their job, or use a free service and didn't log on for 30 or 60 or however-many day).

• Some people never had access to the email address, because they used a text-string that wasn't actually an address, and Google never checked if non-Gmail addresses actually worked.

In these cases, problems happened when that email address was the only tool that the person used to identify their Google accounts.  If it's not real, or they can't access it any more, then Google can't help when they forget their passwords,etc.  So there are some blogs that can never be accessed ever again, because Google has no way of being sure who owns the Google-account that made them.

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