Google, as is natural to the sort of entity it is, buys as many of its potential competitors, or the leading lights in fields it’s interested in developing, as it can. (If it can’t buy, it tries to compete, but that’s never as successful…unless you want to be the Facebook of Brazil.) That’s not news. Several years ago Google bought Blogger; more recently, they’ve acquired YouTube. All fine and dandy, generally. You do your thing, don’t spoil the experience for us, we all keep on rolling.

Here’s one of the things that annoys me about it, though, strictly from a user’s perspective. I use gmail, I use YouTube, I use Blogger. I use Google docs, and I use Google ads. Google has tried to make things easier by associating all these things with one Google account, so that you can hop back and forth between utilities and functions and websites without having to sign back in. Here’s my problem: I have multiple accounts! And I can’t be the only one.

In 2003 I opened a Blogger account with an email I owned the domain for. I’ve since shut down that domain, but would like to merge that account with the account that was opened on Blogger once I signed up for gmail. That’s the one I use for this blog (I grabbed the xml of one of the old blogs to create the archives for The M & M). I also had two YouTube accounts before Google acquired them; one was for family videos, the other for business. I have since opened two more channels, which require whole new accounts, for hobby channels.

I don’t mind keeping track of the usernames and passwords. Truly. Here’s what bugs me…maybe it’s a little thing and I shouldn’t complain. I get automatically signed out of my Blogger account when I sign into a YouTube account with a different email associated with it. I like to do a lot of multitasking and bouncing back and forth between accounts and projects, but I can’t…because Google is trying to be so danged helpful!

Glad that’s off my chest.