It’s awesome that Google is pushing Google Plus early to Google Apps. It’s another sign that the way we communicate every day online is achievable in business, too.

Wow. What a revelation.

But there is a little problem that surfaced again today. It’s the identity question.

Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra, made the announcement today at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google Apps would be getting Google Plus in a matter of days.

Soon after the news broke, Google Apps President David Girouard posted on Google Plus:

Yes, Google+ is on its way to Google Apps users – it’s a matter of days!

Within minutes,  Google Apps Business users said hooray and all that stuff. But with their jubilation, a theme emerged. What about my identity? How will that be managed?

Corey Harris asked:

Will we be able to move our current accounts over? I’ve been using an email I don’t really use anymore just to be part of g+

Dean Oullette:

please please please allow us to port our profile and everything from our gmail account to there so we can stop using these accounts! cc +Vic Gundotra and the rest of the google team

Kalpesh Rathod:

I think the same as +Timothy, +Pete, and +Dean, we should be able to merge this @gmail accounts with Apps. But as we could see that in July when we had merged our google accounts with Apps account, we could not merge/import our @gmail accounts. We will have to work all again if there’s not any option given.

Identity issues have nagged Google Apps for as long as the service has been live. Anyone with any experience with Google Apps will tell you about the hassle. Let’s say you have a personal GMail account. And you have Google Apps account.  Merging these accounts is next to impossible. It’s a dual identity world.

Danny Sullivan ran an epic rant about this very annoying issue earlier this month:

What I do know is that to have my own domain name, I now have to be a Google Apps administrator. And I keep running into all these barriers where you’re demanding that the administrator (that’s me) has to decide if I (that’s me) can use things like Google Docs.

OMG. It’s insane. And you know, I still can’t use my Google Apps account to get into Google+. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there are a ton of GAB folks who are really, really angry that they actually pay you money to find this is a problem for them.

Google has always planned to include Google Plus in Google Apps but accelerated the schedule after the service became so popular. But tell me how is Google going to merge Google Plus accounts with someone’s Google Apps account without fixing the identity problems that already exists?

Services Angle

If you listen to Eve Maler, now a principal analyst with Forrester Research, she talks about every person having their own site where they manage their own identity across any number of social networks.  That would transfer the power from the vendor to the user.

On her Forrester blog, Maler provides the enterprise scenario. She writes about a company she interviewed that runs a whole set of internal lighweight APIs so there is no distinction between an internal external service. In that realm, there really is no enterprise, no need for distinction as the APIs provide the security measures that allow for seamless transitions between personal and work accounts.

Services providers need to wake up to this issue. Identity is what can be the glue in a loosely coupled environment to keep people happy. As in Google’s case it can also create tremendous discontent in the customer community.