Google Promotes Google Accounts

Google created a new Web page that explains users why it's a good quality idea to create a Google account. "One name, one password. That's all you need. Its free. Take a look at how you can personalize and optimize your knowledge across all Google products and services."

Using a Google account, you can share photos, track your favorite stocks, get more storage for your email, share your schedule, create web pages and work together on documents, make free phone calls and chat face to face, get modified search results and personalized news, create custom maps and get the same experience on multiple devices. There's a lot you can do if you have a Google account.

While most of the new Google services and skin require an account, back in January 2005 Google didn't have many services that necessary authentication. As the Wayback Machine shows, the initial services obtainable with a Google account were Google Groups, Google Alerts, Google Answers and Google Web APIs, but Google promised that "in the future, your Google account will give access to all Google programs requiring sign in including: Google AdWords, Google Store and more." One year later, Google previously offered Froogle, Personalized Search and a Personalized Homepage and it was preparing to launch Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Writely and to obtain YouTube.

Google Tests Multiple Accounts Sign in

Google tests a feature that allows you to sign in to the multiple Google accounts in the same browser. Multiple sign-in only works for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Sites and the Google Code, but it's likely that other Google services will be added when this feature will be not publicly available.

If you use a service that doesn't support the multiple sign-in, it will default to the first account that you signed in using your browser. Google suggests to use with a different browser, but you can also use Chrome's incognito mode to sign in to an additional Google account.

Another limitation is that Gmail's offline mode is disabled if you turn on to multiple sign-in.

Multiple sign-in will let you open Gmail in multiple tabs, log in by using different accounts and read the messages from all your accounts without opening another browser. Right now, you have to log out before logging in to a different account.