YouTube insisted I login in order to watch some movie trailer, so I did so with my gmail account. It then insisted that I give a nickname. I didn't care at the time, as I figured I could just change the name later - surely the only unique ID here is my gmail account. And that's why my YouTube name is skadfjlsakdfjlksdfjl.
Ha!
I'm upvoting you because I did almost exactly the same thing in that situation... my YouTube name is lalalalalalalala2334.
Re:Google ate my email address
by lancewiggs on Thursday November 10, 2011 @01:39AM
(#3219196)
and mine "thisloginprocesssux"
YouTube hell gets even better if you signed up for Google Apps in a country where YouTube isn't officially "launched" (what does that even mean?), like Austria.
My google apps account currently has a YouTube account associated with it that causes an error message to replace the current page if I do anything on that site while logged in as that apps account. Like a video, get redirected to a white page saying something went wrong. My solution now is to only log into google apps via Fluid/Mailplane or anonymous Chrome windows.
Whoever engineered this mess should go take a swim in a volcano.
Re:Google ate my email address
by joelhaasnoot on Thursday November 10, 2011 @06:26AM
(#3219724)
As jack of all trades I admin the Google Apps account for our company. Recently (believe September or October was the cutoff) Google Apps accounts became full Google Accounts. Before that, you could have different accounts with the same email and possibly password, but being very different accounts. In the process, they merged your Google App Account and the Google Account for your Google App email into one. It worked quite well, but was very confusing and sometimes spit out errors. I've got all four of us moved over, and having Google App account being a Google Account is much more logical.
I've had a similar experiences.
The Youtube merge was a disaster causing many Gmail addresses to be merged with "nicknamed" Youtube channels that users didn't want anymore. Since Google refuses to step in and delete accounts or unlink them, many people are stuck with a Youtube account nickname they don't want to be associated with. This got even worse over the last few weeks as Google now automatically logs you into Youtube.
The Google Apps/Full Google Account so called "merge" never actually merged anything, it just created 2 full Google Account, a new one under your domain email, and the old one still active under a modified version of the your email address.
Google has no reason why they can't unlink, merge, or rename accounts/usernames. I'm convinced that almost every single person in the world has 2 or more Google accounts.
Google Hell is right.