YiBi's Life|Live Log

Finally, Google+ is here for Google Apps users. I caught a tweet by Dave Girouard just mins ago announcing that it’s ready.

This is the official announcement on Google App blog.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-is-now-available-with-google.html

Gotta try it immediately although it’s already past 1am local time. Headed over to http://plus.google.com. It’s not enabled yet in my domain settings.

Popped over to Google Apps and flicked the switch.

Next, to http://google.com/profiles to get my profile created.

And then to http://plus.google.com and that’s it!

Enjoy!

Great news I saw this morning. I hope Dave Girourard means 2 or 3 days not 10 – 20 days. I have just uploaded over 10GB of pictures into my Picasa account. Seriously looking forward to see all those stuff popping up when Google+ is there.

And next thing Google need to fix: YouTube.

I’m down with a terrible flu this week, so the blogging slowed down as well.

Saw this tweet yesterday, didn’t think it was anytime soon anyway. But Google announced something else: Google+ is now available for public. Really? No. Google Apps users like me are left out because Google can’t get us the Profiles portion on Google Apps. I have read their rationale from forums etc, but the main gripe is that there’s no timeline. In March, they said coming soon, Juiy they said the same thing. It’s September now.

So when are we getting it?

I decided to check out the domain administration page of my Google Apps Account today in the hope of finding the option to turn on Google Profiles. I thought, Google might want to surprise me. Profiles is not there, but I found something yet. Finally, I get my Blogger access back!

I almost stopped blogging these 2 months because I had to use another Gmail account for logging in and this is screwing up my blog pictures that I saved on Picasa with my Google Apps Account. I was really so pissed, I wanted to move the blog back to my webhosting account. All the new updates ended up in another Picasa account.

I’m glad they got the Blogger issue fixed. Now the next thing that I hope to get, is my Google Profiles, so that I can get on Google+. To the Google Engineers working on the post-transition issues: Thanks a bunch!

After my last episode with transition to the new Google infrastructure, I have been considering whether I should stay on Google Apps. Another one of my blog is on Google, my mails with my own domain is also with Google and I’m paying for extra storage on my mail and Picassa. Tons of my photos are with Google. Google created the stickiness which I’m ready to accept, given the brillant track record they have for their services.

Now, Google+ is launched. My friends told me that their Picassa photos appear automatically on G+, they are porting their profiles over from Facebook, and they are asking me for my G+ account. And all of them are surprise that I don’t have it, given that I have been preaching to everyone the amazing benefits of using Google Apps.

I have been reading forums and it’s not surprising to find that there are tons of people like me, stuck! The common sentiment is, ‘it’s ok, we trust Google will do something about this, but WHEN?!’. Google has been silent about this. There’s no indication at all on the prospect of Google Apps users getting Google+ (and getting my Blogger account back).

The only sure way I can get it now, is to actually to move my domain out of Google, cancel my Apps account and register a personal account with my yibi.org email address. The next best and natural choice is Apple’s iCloud, but maybe just hosting my mails back at my own server.

Well, let’s see if Google can fix this fast. Otherwise, I’m going to get started on moving.

For once, I’m so upset with Google Apps. I have been using Google Apps for my own domain since 2009. I love the mail app, the calendar, etc etc. And over the years I have converted alot of my friends to Google Apps from their webhosting. You can’t beat it, it’s free!

Lately, Google started consolidating all their services. Legacy apps like Picasa, Analytics etc are merged into Google Apps, so that there’s a single point of control and ownership. As an avid supporter, I opted for the transition immediately.

Everything was ok initially, until I tried editing my baby girl’s blog that’s hosted on Blogger. I couldn’t get myself authenticated with the Google Apps account. I went on to read up on the conflicting account resolution stuff and did all the steps that were stated. Nothing works. My Google Apps account had no access to Blogger for whatever reason. There’s no way I could enable this service from the domain administration page at Google Apps. I get ‘Service Not Available’ when I try to login to Blogger with my Google Apps account and I kept getting referred back to enable the service in my control panel. And obviously the option is not even there!

Fortunate thing is that I could still login with another account out of Google Apps to administer the blog. It would be really unimaginable I lost data or ownership to other services like Picasa.

I submitted my domain to Blogger in one of the help threads in the forums. Hopefully Blogger can get this resolved as soon as possible.

Google Buzz

Google launched Google Buzz, a social networking platform. This is cool, because I’m an avid user of Google. But I’m wondering at the same time, what’s going to happen to Google Wave? The functions seems to overlap, although Wave seems to be more cutting edge.

Right now Google Buzz is only available on Gmail. I wished they had it on Google Apps for Your Domain as well. I host my email, docs, calendars etc on Google using my own domain. Unfortunately, I can’t use Buzz with my own domain. Same goes for Wave when it was launched.

Google Buzz *IS* available on Google Apps For Your Domain! For some reason it didn’t show up in the mail interface on the PC, but it works on my IPhone. Cool! That means now I can have all my stuff on Google. Mail, Calendar, Docs, Picassa.

Find out more about Google Buzz at http://buzz.google.com

And no. No IPhone app for Google Buzz yet. Probably never.