Thepipbuzz

This article is about Google accounts:  what they are- and aren't, how to access them, and what the account-names look like.   Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a website on the internet called Blogger.   People created an account on Blogger, and then used it to make a blog - which was owned by their Blogger account. Then Google (the company that made the search engine) purchased Blogger.   They wanted to integrate their products, so Blogger users had to change their original Blogger accounts to "Google accounts", which still had a Blogger profile.  Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but eventually said that no more conversions were possible. At the time, very few people understood the difference between Google-the-company and Google-the-search-engine , so most didn't have any idea of the power and importance of these "Google acc...

This article is about how to set up a Google Plus profile for a Blogger account which already exists.  It looks at the history of Blogger and Google accounts, how to make a Google+ profile for a Blogger account, and what the consequences of this might be. Google+ and Blogger accounts Once upon a time, you could sign up to use Blogger without using Google at all. Then Google purchased Blogger, and over time the two types of accounts were slowly combined - and everyone who had an old "Blogger-only" account was asked to convert it to a Google account , which also gave them access to other features like Picasa-web-albums, Analytics, etc. People who signed up to Gmail first found that this made them a Google account that had access to email (via a gmail address), and Blogger, PWA, etc. More recently, Google introduced Google+. Today, people who sign-up to use Blogger are asked for their real name during the registration process, and are automatically set up with a Google+ ac...

This QuickTip introduces a useful post about password management from Google. Giving computer or password-management advice to people who don't have lot of experience with IT has always been challenging: there is a lot of background information that you need to know before it all starts to make sense. And eaching colleagues to use a mouse back in the 1990s was a lot easier than explaining on-line services and security is in the twenty-teens!  I know that I'm not the only person who struggled to explain the difference between email and gmail to someone who just didn't understand " gmail is one type of software for doing emails " - he just kept asking "so what does fmail do?" To help with this challenge, Google have released a very carefully written article with advice about managing passwords. My guess is that lots of research went into working out exactly how much someone who uses a few on-line services needs to know, and how to explain it simply. Th...

This article describes Google's Inactive Account Manager, a new tool that gives you control over what happens to your Google account if you don't log on to it for a period of time. Ages ago, I read a thought-provoking article on ProBlogger about making a "blogging will" . His main aim was to ensure that his family could access his business assets (ie his blogs etc) if something untoward happened to him. Now, Google's Data Liberation Front have annnounced a new tool called the Inactive Account Manager , which lets Google account owners say what should happen if they ever stop using their account. This tool lets you decide If and when your account should be treated as inactive What happens with your data if it becomes inactive, and Who else is notified, and what is said to them. At the moment, it covers these Google tools - which are attached to your Google account : +1s Blogger Contacts and Circles Drive (which I guess means Docs too) Gmail Google+ Profiles, Pages ...