Jon Smajda's Blog

Managing Google Account Proliferation

Posted on Saturday, August 22, 2009

Now that the the U of M is going Google I will have four separate Google accounts that I frequently use. I use Google Apps for smajda.com, contexts.org, umn.edu (soon) and I also have an old gmail account I still use, not for email, but for various other services such as Google Reader. To make matters even worse, I have a “regular Google account” using the same email address as my Google Apps account for my domain in order to use some services that aren’t available on Google Apps with that email. Google offers no way to merge accounts (or, at minimum, pretty pretty please: merge contacts!), and just about everyday I encounter one of the following scenarios:

• I'm logged into my smajda.com email (where I consolidate all my email) and needing to quickly check something in Google Docs for my contexts.org acccount.
• I'm logged into one of my Google Apps accounts and when I switch to Reader I have to logout and log back in using my regular Gmail account.

And so on and so forth. It’s not unusual for me to have three or four separate browsers open at once just to deal with this problem.

However, here’s a cool trick my friend TJ suggested last night: use Chrome’s Incognito mode. Since it doesn’t share cookies with normal Chrome windows, you can login under a different account for one service & not screw up what you’re doing with the first Google account:

This probably works with Firefox and Safari as well. But Chrome’s Incognito mode just looks cooler.

Plus I just wanted an excuse to post about how much I’ve been using Chromium lately. It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but is shaping up to be a very nice browser.