Google Apps Users to Get Regular Google Accounts as Well

With tons of products under its belt, Google is part of many people’s online life. And for all those products, all you need is one account. Handy, since there are also plenty of third-party websites and services that accept Google accounts.

But more and more users also have Google Apps accounts and it is somewhat of a hassle to manage both. And those using the Apps account as their primary one have to create a separate Google account to access all of the free Google products that are not part of Apps.

Finally, Google is doing something about that with plans to enable Apps users to log into any Google service with their existing credentials. This is a great move and most users should appreciate the new tools put at their disposal without any hassle and headaches.

The way Google plans to handle this is to create a regular, personal account using the email provided by Apps, which is going to be something like user@example.com. After that, Apps users will be able to log into Reader, Picasa, YouTube and so on with their existing usernames and passwords.

Creating a new Google account requires a valid email address. You can set up a Gmail account and use that or provide any other email address you may have. Now, for Apps users, a regular account will be automatically created. The program is still in testing and the account creation hasn’t been enabled for Apps users yet.

One problem is that some users may have already created accounts using their Apps email. Google will create new accounts for them as well and their existing personal ones will be changed to something like user+personal@example.com. What’s more, the accounts won’t be merged, so users will end up with two separate accounts for the same email.

“For example, your Google Apps email address is email@my-domain.com. A while back, you may have signed up for Blogger with this email address, which created a Google Account. Since we've moved your Google Apps account to a Google Account infrastructure to allow access to all Google products, your other Google Account will be renamed to: email+personal@my-domain.com. You should add the +personal extension to your email address if you'd like to sign in to your old account,” a Google Help page explains. [via Google OS]