Still FAR to com­plex for the aver­age user, Google attempts to “clar­ify” the com­plex­i­ties of their Google Apps product.

Via: Why Google Apps Users Miss Out on Reg­u­lar Gmail Features—and Some Solu­tions [Annoyances]

If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email and other ser­vices with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on ser­vices that “reg­u­lar” accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Ana­lyt­ics, and right now, Buzz. Here’s why:

After com­plain­ing about the dis­par­i­ties on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a help­ful Googler unof­fi­cially got in touch to clar­ify. Let’s call her/him “Help­ful McGoogler.” Here’s what HM said.

To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there’s only one kind of account: a Google Account.

Help­ful McGoogler explains:

Abstract the idea of a “Google Account” from being asso­ci­ated with Gmail or Google Apps. You can tie ANY email address to a “Google Account.”

Check out https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and notice that it asks you for your “cur­rent email address.” So let’s say I go to school at Big Uni­ver­sity and I have an email address helpfulmcgoogler@biguni.edu… I can use that email address while sign­ing up and that will be my login name to access Google services.

Some of the con­fu­sion that leads to “you must have a gmail.com address” to access Google ser­vices is because a “Google Account” comes “for free” when you open a Gmail account. So using a gmail address always ‘just works.’

Google Apps accounts pro­vide “hosted ser­vices,” which don’t include every­thing vanilla Google accounts get.

Help­ful McGoogler says:

When you open a Google Apps domain account. You are essen­tially cre­at­ing a branded Google Account world for the Google ser­vices your domain is host­ing. You can see your ser­vices at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[domain.name]/Dashboard.

So, let’s say you have a Google Apps domain that is example.com and you cre­ated a user gina@example.com. You will be able to log-in with gina@example.com for all your Google Apps hosted ser­vices. Typ­i­cally this is email, docs, cal­en­dar, and con­tacts… but you can click the “add more ser­vices” link to expand that. Right now, you won’t find stuff like Reader, Google Voice, AdWords, Finance, Ana­lyt­ics, etc… but still there is some inter­est­ing stuff in there.

But what if you want to access ALL ser­vices through a sin­gle email address?

Help­ful McGoogler says:

What you do is cre­ate a NORMAL Google Account (described at the begin­ning) and asso­ciate it with your gina@example.com email address. That “vanilla” google account will now have access to all (well, I think all) Google ser­vices. You can have a Reader account, a Voice account, an Ana­lyt­ics account, etc all asso­ci­ated with your non-gmail address. It can even have the same password—but it doesn’t need to—to make it seem like it’s the same account… but in real­ity, it’s a very sep­a­rate account.

Still, this just means you have two dif­fer­ent Google accounts, with dif­fer­ent Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar and Google Docs data on each. A Google Apps account pro­vides a sub­set of the ser­vices you get with a reg­u­lar Google Account, and so dupli­cates those sets of data on those ser­vices. This is the sce­nario I com­plained about on TWiG.

Help­ful McGoogler acknowl­edges that this is indeed a problem:

Here is a sce­nario that really trips peo­ple up… Let say you are using your gina@example.com email and are all happy that you have your con­tacts all in-line and orga­nized and filled out. Now you go and cre­ate a vanilla Google Account using your gina@example.com email address (mostly because you want to use Google Voice and Google Reader with the same log-in as your Apps account—btw, this was totally me a cou­ple years ago). When you set up some­thing like Google Voice, you will expect your con­tacts to be full of all the good­ness you set up in your gina@example.com “hosted gmail” instance… you will be dis­ap­pointed to find your con­tacts are empty.

This is because the vanilla Google Account that is being used for Google Voice will be access­ing a DIFFERENT “Con­tacts” ser­vice which has no data (sad­ness). My ugly solu­tion was to ini­tially export the con­tacts from my Google Apps Account and import them to my Google vanilla Account and try to keep them in sync when I make edits.

This dou­ble set of Con­tacts espe­cially stinks for Android users who sign into Android with their Google Apps account, because your Google Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar are baked into your phone setup.

Help­ful McGoogler is with me on this:

When you add Android into the mix, Con­tacts get weird. Because, I think, you can add your Google Apps account to Android and not your gina@example.com “vanilla” Google Account. (GT: Yes, this is true.) But, when you sign in to Google Voice on Android, you will need to enter the pass­word (which might be the same) of your vanilla Google Account. BUT, on Android, your Con­tacts are read from the system’s phone book. Not nec­es­sar­ily the vanilla Google Voice Google Account that has its sep­a­rate con­tacts (acces­si­ble through the nor­mal Google Voice webapp). Ugh. The “Con­tacts” issue is by far the most ‘hurt­ing’ in this whole scenario.

Yup. Cal­en­dar is also an issue.

I thought this was the full extent of the prob­lem, so it’s nice to have even unof­fi­cial con­fir­ma­tion from the horse’s mouth. Help­ful McGoogler DID say s/he thought the teams at Google are aware of the issue and are work­ing to address it. It also sounds like some bits of Android need to get refac­tored to work seam­lessly with both vanilla Google accounts and Google Apps accounts.

After that episode of TWiG aired, at least three lis­ten­ers emailed me say­ing they use third-party ser­vice Soo­cial to sync Con­tacts across their mul­ti­ple Google/Google Apps accounts. I haven’t tried this myself—and you may have to enter your Google account pass­word into Soo­cial to set it up, which is a big red flag—but it’s something.

Are you hav­ing the Google Apps account dilemma? What are you doing to deal with it? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Google, Gmail, and Google Apps Accounts Explained [Smarterware]

Smarter­ware is Life­hacker edi­tor emer­i­tus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the lat­est from Smarter­ware, be sure to sub­scribe to the Smarter­ware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarter­ware fea­ture here on Life­hacker.

George and Jesus

by Har­vey Wasser­man
Feb­ru­ary 14, 2010

“God made the idiot for prac­tice, and then He made the school board.”
–Mark Twain

Today’s New York Times Sun­day Mag­a­zine high­lights yet another mob of extrem­ists using the Texas School Board to bap­tize our children’s textbooks.

This end­less, ever-angry esca­lat­ing assault on our Con­sti­tu­tion by cru­sad­ing theocrats could be oblit­er­ated with the effec­tive incan­ta­tion of two names: Ben­jamin Franklin, and Deganawidah.

But first, let’s do some history:

1. Actual Founder-Presidents #2 through #6 — John Adams, Thomas Jef­fer­son, James Madi­son, James Mon­roe and John Quincy Adams — were all free­think­ing Deists and Uni­tar­i­ans; what Chris­t­ian pre­cepts they embraced were mod­er­ate, tol­er­ant and open-minded.

2. Actual Founder-President #1, George Wash­ing­ton, became an Angli­can as required for orig­i­nal mil­i­tary ser­vice under the British, and occa­sion­ally quoted scrip­ture. But he vehe­mently opposed any church-state union. In a 1790 let­ter to the Jews of Truro, he wrote: The “Gov­ern­ment of the United States, which gives to big­otry no sanc­tion, to per­se­cu­tion no assis­tances, requires only that they who live under its pro­tec­tion, should demean them­selves as good cit­i­zens.” A 1796 treaty he signed says “the gov­ern­ment of the United States of Amer­ica is not, in any sense, founded on the Chris­t­ian reli­gion.” Wash­ing­ton rarely went to church and by some accounts refused last reli­gious rites.

3. Wash­ing­ton was also the nation’s lead­ing brewer, and since most Amer­i­cans drank much beer (water could be lethal in the cities) they reg­u­larly trem­bled before the keg, not the altar. Like Wash­ing­ton, Jef­fer­son and Madi­son, vir­tu­ally all Amer­i­can farm­ers raised hemp and its variations.

4. Jef­fer­son pro­duced a per­sonal Bible from which he edited out all ref­er­ence to the “mirac­u­lous” from the life of Jesus, whom he con­sid­ered both an activist and a mortal.

5. Tom Paine’s COMMON SENSE sparked the Rev­o­lu­tion with nary a men­tion of Jesus or Chris­tian­ity. His Deist Cre­ator estab­lished the laws of Nature, endowed humans with Free Will, then left.

6. The Con­sti­tu­tion never men­tions the words “Chris­t­ian” or “Jesus” or “Christ.”

7. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Amer­ica was filled with Chris­tians whose com­mit­ment to tol­er­a­tion and diver­sity was com­pletely adverse to the vio­lent, racist, misog­y­nist, anti-sex theo­cratic Puri­tans whose “City on the Hill” meant a total­i­tar­ian state. Inspi­ra­tional preach­ers like Rhode Island’s Roger Williams and reli­gious groups like the Quak­ers envi­sioned a nation built on tol­er­ance and love for all.

8. The US was founded less on Judeo-Christian beliefs than on the Greco-Roman love for dia­log and rea­son. There are no con­tem­po­rary por­traits of any Founder wear­ing a cru­ci­fix or church garb. But Wash­ing­ton was famously painted half-naked in the buff toga of the Roman Repub­lic, which con­tin­ues to inspire much of our offi­cial architecture.

9. The great guerilla fighter (and fur­ni­ture maker) Ethan Allen was an aggres­sive athe­ist; his beliefs were com­mon among the farm­ers, sailors and arti­sans who were the back­bone of Rev­o­lu­tion­ary America.

10. America’s most influ­en­tial states­man, thinker, writer, agi­ta­tor, pub­lisher, citizen-scientist and proud lib­eral lib­er­tine was — and remains — Ben­jamin Franklin. He was at the heart of the Dec­la­ra­tion, Con­sti­tu­tion and Treaty of Paris end­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion. The ulti­mate Enlight­en­ment icon, Franklin’s Deism embraced a prag­matic love of diver­sity. As early America’s dom­i­nant pub­lisher he, Paine and Jef­fer­son printed the intel­lec­tual soul of the new nation.

11. Franklin deeply admired the Ho-de-no-sau-nee (Iro­quois) Con­fed­er­acy of what’s now upstate New York. Inspired by the leg­endary peace­maker Deganaw­idah, this demo­c­ra­tic con­gress of five tribes had worked “bet­ter than the British Par­lia­ment” for more than two cen­turies. It gave us the model for our fed­eral struc­ture and the images of free­dom and equal­ity that inspired both the French and Amer­i­can Revolutions.

It’s no acci­dent today’s fun­da­men­tal­ist cru­saders and media blovi­a­tors (Rev. Lim­baugh, St. Beck) seek to purge our children’s texts of all native images except as they are being force­ably con­verted or killed.

Today’s fun­da­men­tal­ists would have DESPISED the actual Founders. Franklin’s joy­ous, amply rec­i­p­ro­cated love of women would evoke their lim­it­less rage. Jefferson’s pater­ni­ties with his slave mis­tress Sally Hem­ings, Paine’s attacks on the priest­hood, Hamilton’s bas­tardly phi­lan­der­ing, the grass­roots scorn for orga­nized reli­gion — all would draw howls of right­eous right-wing rage.

Which may be why theo­cratic fun­da­men­tal­ists are so des­per­ate to san­i­tize and fic­tion­al­ize what’s real about our history.

God for­bid our chil­dren should know of Amer­i­can Chris­tians who embraced the Ser­mon on the Mount and renounced the Book of Revelations…or natives who estab­lished democ­racy on Amer­i­can soil long before they saw the first European…or actual Founders who got drunk, high and laid on their way to writ­ing the Constitution.

Faith-based tyranny is anti-American. So are dis­hon­est text­books. It’s time to fight them both.

HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with PASSIONS OF THE POTSMOKING PATRIOTS by “Thomas Paine.” This arti­cle is writ­ten in honor of the spirit of Howard Zinn.