Monday, December 22, 2008

Migrating an orkut account to an existing gmail account

shhhhabbha! I spent 5 minutes to come up with a title which finally didn't convey what I want to. Anyways I can't blame myself because the topic itself is complicated and the terminologies are confusing.

I'm one of those who signed into orkut without an existing google account (mostly created via gmail at those times). Google was smart enough to not mandate people to create a gmail account, but use your existing email address of any domain as the username for the google account and link that against orkut. ie., you can create a google account with your existing email address as the username, and enjoy all google services except gmail. I needed only orkut so I didn't really care. Everything was fine and easy, until I created a gmail for my own use and slowly started using other google services against it. After all, now that I am using a bunch of other services from google, I would prefer to use the gmail account. But this is where the problem is.

In my case, I had created a gmail account and had many other services linked to my gmail google account except for my orkut account. Now that I want to bring in my orkut account also into my gmail account as one umbrella, I'm not able to do that. It turns out that orkut allows me to change my email address from abc@yahoo.com to any other thirdparty email address except for gmail. In effect, I cannot get my older orkut account to my recent gmail based google account. In a common scenario, what I am asking for is probably utter non-sense because I want to migrate a service from one google account to another. But in reality this is a very common scenario which arose as a side-effect of allowing users to sign-up to orkut without a gmail address.

I really didn't expect that Google wouldn't allow me to do such an expected move until I saw the official clarification in the orkut Help page.

I understand it is complicated (infact there needs a way to disambiguate the precedences) to merge the services between both the Google accounts but at least an option to migrate an orkut account seems necessary, given the signup was so liberal.

I'm having to use two Google accounts just for the sake of orkut, and because it is not possible to sign-in to two Google accounts at the same time, I'm having to use Chrome for one (one more reason to use Chrome after the incognito mode).

I hope Google solves this problem but there is no sign!

2 comments:

  1. same problem, no solution for years..

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  2. thats very much true... same prob here...
    to shift orkut from yahoo to gmail or not able to change the password ord of yahoo account used by orkut even though i have changed the yahoo password bt the password accepted by orkut remains the same... plz someone solve my problem...

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