Google accounts
It's about time Google sorted out a system to cope with people who have multiple accounts with them. I reckon I've got 3 email addresses used for Adsense, Analytics and googlegroups. Then there's a gmail account also used for Googletalk. And an Orkut account. And Blogger. Then I've got a signin to Google Earth as well

Now currently these tend to be stored in cookies and things like Googletalk have trouble working out who you currently are. If you made the mistake (I did) of using different email addesses for different services, you then find yourself constantly logging in and logging out. And every so often you end up with a password change in one system (like something in the UK) that doesn't propagate to the others.

Yahoo! hit the exact same problem some years ago and allowed you to link email addresses together and confirm that they all represented a single person. As they acquire people like Flickr and now del.icio.us they're doing a fairly good job at adding them into the system. Google needs to do the same. and soon.

Looking at all this, Google and Yahoo! have a golden opportunity to create a competitor to Passport but to do it in an open way with plenty of APIs (preferably based on something like OpenID). I really don't understand why they don't do this.

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[ 13-Dec-05 10:12am ] [ , , ]