Understanding Google Accounts

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

Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts

Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a website on the internet called Blogger.   People created an account on Blogger, and then used it to make a blog - which 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", which still had a Blogger profile.  Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but eventually said that no more conversions were possible.

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 Gaoogle accounts grew (Gmail, Picasa-web-albums, Google-custom-maps, AdSense, AdWords, etc), this became clearer.

In mid/late 2011, Google introduced Google+, which is a social-networking and identity service.  Originally, G+ accounts required people to use their real names, which some Bloggers didn't want to do.   But this policy was gradually weakened:

• Since early 2013 it has been possible to give a Google+ Page its own loginID and password - effectively making it a stand-alone G+ account,
• In mid 2014 Google announced that real-names were no longer required.

Blogger / Google profiles can be converted into Google+ accounts.

Or they can be left as normal Google accounts   (which are sometimes called "Google Minus" or "G-" accounts).

Getting a Google account

To make a new Google account, you just have to use the Create an Account link near the bottom of the account-selection list on the login-page of any product that Google offers (Gmail, Blogger, AdSense, etc).

You then have to provide a a few details - note though you have to give a first name and last name, these don't need to be your real names any more.

These days, by default, new accounts are Google+ accounts - but you can opt out of this during the sign-up process if you want.    If you do this, you won't have access to all Google's features (eg Google+ Photos) - but you will have everything you need to use Blogger.

Account names look like email address

Google account names always look like email addresses, ie they are of the form:

willy.worm@yourMail.com

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

However it is possible to have an account name that is simply a text-string that looks like an email address.

For a long time Google didn't even check if there was a valid email account with that address at the time you signed up   This has changed now:  Google warn you that they will send an email message to the account that you give, to verify that you own it, and that you won't have full use of the account until it is verified.

However, even today, if a Google account was created some time ago, you cannot guarantee that the person who owns a Google account still owns - or indeed ever owned - the email-address with the same name.

This means there are Google accounts called Joe.blogs@yahoo.com, and similar.   And there are even Google accounts with a name that is not, and never has been, a real email address.

Some of the 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 previously 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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Related Articles: 

Blogs, Blogger and Bloggers, Google Inc vs google - some basic terms

Giving a Google+ Page its own loginID and password

Understanding Google Apps accounts

Fixing conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts

AdSense and AdWords - understanding the difference.

How to set up a Google+ profile for an existing Blogger account

This article is about how to set up a Google Plus profile for a Blogger account which already exists.  It looks at the history of Blogger and Google accounts, how to make a Google+ profile for a Blogger account, and what the consequences of this might be.

Google+ and Blogger accounts

Once upon a time, you could sign up to use Blogger without using Google at all.

Then Google purchased Blogger, and over time the two types of accounts were slowly combined - and everyone who had an old "Blogger-only" account was asked to convert it to a Google account, which also gave them access to other features like Picasa-web-albums, Analytics, etc. People who signed up to Gmail first found that this made them a Google account that had access to email (via a gmail address), and Blogger, PWA, etc.

More recently, Google introduced Google+.

Today, people who sign-up to use Blogger are asked for their real name during the registration process, and are automatically set up with a Google+ account at the same time. But it is possible to opt out of this and not use Google+ with the Google/Blogger account. And there are many people - and organisations - who have Google accounts which were created before Google+ was launched and which do not currently have a Google+ profile.   This is is not a problem until the owner finds there is some feature in Google+ which affects how Blogger operates, eg the auto-enhance features in Picasa-web-albums / Google+ Photos.

Luckily it's very easy to set up a Google+ profile for an existing Blogger or Google account.   And doing this does not force you to actually use Google+ for anything:   it's possible to set up the Google Plus account, use it for whatever you need to, and then never use it again.

How to set up a Google+ account for an existing Blogger account

Log in to Blogger using the Google account that you use to edit / administer your blog at the moment.


In another tab or window in the same browser, to go www.plus.google.com


If your Google account is not already set up for Google+, then the Google Plus registration screen will open, with some details automatically filled in from your Blogger/Google account profile.

Check these details, enter a gender and date of birth, tick the "I understand the Picasa" changes box, and press Upgrade.


Depending on how Google has interpreted your name from your Google / Blogger profile, you may get an error message like this:

The name you entered doesn't seem to meet our Names Policy. Check it over and try again.
Did we mess up? Click here to submit an appeal (usually processed in 24 hours).

If so, you can either submit an appeal (by clicking the button) or change the name that Google suggested from your Blogger profile - for example by removing any hyphens from it..   Notice that they don't actually ask for your real name - even though this is what Google Plus is supposed to have.


Once you have resolved any problems with the name etc, your Google Plus profile will be created.

Customizing your Google+ Profile - or not

After your profile is created, the sign-up tool takes you through two more screens where you can connect to other people, and to choose people or pages to follow.  

If you want to use your Google+ profile, then it is a good idea to do this.

And if you don't connect to any people, you will get a message telling you that you might be lonely - just click Continue Anyway, unless this concerns you.

Has this linked your blog to Google+?

Absolutely not.  

The procedure described above simply creates a Google+ profile for the Google account that you are using.    It does not change your blog settings in any way, and any Blogger posts that you make will still be attached to your Blogger profile, not to the Google+ profile.

If you want to attach your blog to your Google+ profile, then you can change this by clicking the Get Started button on the Google+ tab, and accepting the changes.    But this is not compulsory - and it may not be a good idea on if you are an administrator of any team blogs, because this switch affects all your blogs.

Terms and Conditions

Notice that you were not asked to agree to any Terms and Conditions at any point in the Google+ account creation process - apart from agreeing that you understood the impact on your Picasa-web-albums.

However there are, of course, some.   You can read them here.  There is also a Names Policy, which says that:

Google+ profiles are for individuals. If you want to use Google+ to represent someone or something other than yourself -- like your business, your band, your family, or your pet -- you should create a Google+ page instead.

So if your Blogger account represents something other than you (eg I have one for my choir, and one for a local parents group), and you convert it to a Google+ profile, then you will be breaking Google's rules - even though they did not point this out to you during the conversion process, and even though there are some aspects than you cannot set for a Google+ page.

So you need to be aware of this, and weigh up whether the benefits of having a non-compliant Google+ account are worth the risks involved.

At the moment, it's just not clear how much Google are viewing this as a problem, and whether they will do things like delete Google+ profiles that break the rules in this way.    By comparison, Facebook do this.   But the Google+ situation is a little different because of the historic nature of the separate accounts.

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Related Articles:

Understanding Google accounts

Ways to let other people contribute to your blog

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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 experience with IT has always been challenging: there is a lot of background information that you need to know before it all starts to make sense.

And eaching colleagues to use a mouse back in the 1990s was a lot easier than explaining on-line services and security is in the twenty-teens!  I know that I'm not the only person who struggled to explain 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?"

To help with this challenge, Google 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.

They key points they cover are:

1. Use a different password for each important service
2. Make your password hard to guess
3. Keep a copy of 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?

What happens to your blog if your Google account becomes inactive?

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.

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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