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0 pointsblakeyrat10y ago0 comments

You aren't the only one. I have two Gmail addresses, and two YouTube channels.

As far as I can tell, I have FIVE Google+ accounts (there may be more!):

1. Nickname email for friends

2. Real name email for family/jobs

3. A SECOND nickname account that somehow got created when I logged into YouTube one time

4. A SECOND real name account that somehow got created when I logged into YouTube some other time

5. The YouTube channel I shared with a friend, which has a Gmail account but inexplicably is only a single Google+ account unlike the two listed above

I honestly have no idea why 3 & 4 exist. They seem to have gotten created at some point for some reason I never understood.

In my eyes, the biggest problems with Google+ are:

* It's CONFUSING AS HECK. Just figuring out what an account is, or why it got created, is way more effort than I care about

* Their integration with YouTube was ridiculously not thought-out. Not in ANY way. They somehow seemed to think there was a 1:1 relationship users -> channels, when in reality it's a many:many relationship. Why did they think that? Why didn't anybody say, "uh, guys? A person can have more than one YouTube channel. And two people or more can run a single YouTube channel."

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3 comments · 3 top-level

CamperBob210y ago

The thing Google really fails to understand is the cognitive burden imposed by all of their byzantine rules. I didn't mind creating multiple accounts for YouTube versus G+ and the like, the same way I have one account name for HN and another on Fark.

If I'm forced to create a single account, now I have to take the time to understand how it works and what it exposes to the world. I have better things to do than to try to keep up with Google's business model du jour and anticipate the many ways they might alter the deal in the future to my disadvantage. It's so much simpler for me to do the worst thing for Google that they can possibly imagine, which is to ignore their offerings altogether.

I think that's how they ended up with a ghost town full of millions of unused Google+ accounts.

RegW10y ago

I administer 2 non-profit domains that use google services. When google started randomly merging all my email/youtube/blogger/appEngine/googledocs accounts together I got into a right gtempaccount.com pickle.

I thought I had it all sorted out, and started using separate browsers for each account. However, the company I work for have now decided to use gmail - so I'm back to having to clear my cookies all the time, and keep getting that "New sign-in from Chrome/Firefox on Window" spam.

Hmm - I wonder if this is also hurting their corporate customers?

austinjp10y ago

Amen. Anyone who has spent time setting up Google accounts, pages, authorship/identity details, maps and local, YouTube channels etc etc for SEO or similar purposes soon realises how horribly it's all cobbled together. Apparently they seriously think people will voluntarily use these services as some sort of unified social media platform.

Everybody has done this sort of thing simply for blindly hopeful SEO reasons, surely?

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