trishussey
on
Did you hear a strange sound today? Something like relief, but also tinged with a little excitement? Yeah that would because thousands of Google Apps users can now finally use those email addresses with Google+.
See, until today people had to dust off their gmail.com addresses to use Google+. Which was fine for me because I’ve had my gmail.com ID since, well the start of Gmail, but lots of other people use other email addresses as their primary identity online. Lots of folks, like Vancouver’s own tech expert Tod Maffin, don’t really use their gmail.com address and were forced to use them if they wanted to be plusing with the rest of us. Today the Google Apps folks announced that finally Google Apps accounts could use those IDs for Google+. Sure we all knew this day was coming, we just didn’t know when. Now there is a little, er, snag for the moment. See while Google says they will have a transfer tool available soon so you can port a gmail.com-based Google+ account (and all your circles and those who follow you on G+) to your new ID, it’s not available yet. What some folks are doing is not waiting and just starting the move over now regardless—including setting up new circles and such.
I think that’s a lot of work, myself.
My advice to Google Apps users is to set up your Google+ account for your domain (if you want, I’m going to take a pass I think) now, but wait on the circle creating, etc until Google takes the wraps off their transfer tool.
One of the cool features for Google Apps users is that you’ll be able to share something with your entire organization/domain even if you aren’t in everyone’s circles. Can you say corporate intranet on the cheap? The only flaw in this is if you have your primary Google ID that you connect with, but also are part of a larger team where you have a Google Apps email address as well. I foresee a bunch of people doing the log in-log out action to manage this kind of situation, which is probably okay, and I’ll be Google has a plan for including people with in your Google App circles who have different Google IDs.
Now what I’d really like is to have a system like on LinkedIn where you can have something like “also known by these email addresses” feature. That would be a slick piece of work.
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