Dear Google:
Today started out like any other day. After opening my eyes and wiping the drool off the edge of my lips I reached for my iPhone and began what I call “the cycle”. First, open up “Sunrise Sunset Lite“, a neat little application that uses my current location to calculate when dawn and dusk take place and then displays how many hours and minutes of sunlight I can expect to experience. Live in Finland as long as I have, and you’ll know why this is precious information. Next, open up “XE Currency” to see how the Euro and American Dollar are doing; it’s a basic way to gauge the health of both the American economy and the Euro Zone. After that it’s time to crack open “Facebook” and see which of my friends had a party last night and uploaded hilarious photos of their drunken adventures, and to read any interesting articles or watch YouTube shorts or music videos that might have been posted. Done with that, it’s time to check up on “Twitter” and see what’s going on in the world while also favoriting interesting tweets pointing to articles I may way to read when I’m in front of my computer.
Here’s where you ruined my day. After finishing up with “Twitter” I load up Safari and check my email, usually my work account first since I rarely get messages in my personal account. Today you asked me to agree to a new terms of service that says my administrator (read: my boss) can read my email, something I don’t mind since it’s a work account and I treat it as such, but the part that’s really infuriating is that you now want to let me use my work email account to access other Google services. In other words, you want me to use my work email identity to record my search history, check up on your daft new social networking service, and whatever other services you guys offer. To do this you log me out of my personal account.
Whereas before I could count on gmail.com to show me my personal email and gmail.intomobile.com to show me my work email, today that distinction has disappeared. If I go to gmail.intomobile.com it forwards to gmail.com and then shows me my work email. If I then type in gmail.com, oh look, there’s my work email again … wait, what?! Why did you do this? And don’t tell me to start using the native iPhone email client, because I have no plans on doing that, and don’t tell me to switch to Android either, because I’m done with that … at least until Ice Cream Sandwich. Logging out of my work email and typing in the credentials to my personal email is out of the question too since my password is painfully long, that and I have SMS verification turned on for added security; last year I got hacked by the Chinese, this year I got hacked by a jealous ex-girlfriend.
So with that, thank you for ruining “the cycle” because you have ambitions to take over the world by forcing people to use their Google account to experience the entire internet. You’re slowly evolving to become what AOL was in the 90s, or worse yet MSN Passport.
Please stop.
Update: Wonderful, you’re trying to do the same shit in my desktop browser. Now I have to keep Opera running in the background to handle my work account since I rely on my personal account for Google Reader.
Update: Hat tip to “leglevy”, who left a comment below suggesting that I use “Incognito Mode” in Google Chrome. Now I don’t need to have another desktop browser open.
