Google Apps: Migration to New Services

As of yesterday, I had two Google accounts: my irrsinn.net Google Apps account and my regular ol’ Google Account. Both had the same email address, but the Google Account let me into services like Reader, Voice, and Feedburner.

Having two accounts was annoying, but not unbearable. It meant that Google Voice, for instance, had none of my preciously-maintained and iWone-synced contacts. I just created contacts within Voice as calls came in, no biggie, but I’ve definitely been using the service less as a result.

Turns out that Google’s been working on this, and recently added a boatload to services to Google Apps users: Voice, Feedburner, and Reader being the three I’m more interested in. AdSense was tricky, and was only moved for posterity.

Feedburner and Reader

Getting Feedburner and Reader migrated were easy: Feedburner has a built-in transfer tool, and Reader has import/export tools. Done.

Voice

Voice requires filling out a form once Google Voice is up on the Google Apps side. From what I understand–my request isn’t completed yet–it’ll move the phone number and my voicemails and texts. It’s no biggie to wait for that since I still have access through my old account, although folks are reporting lengthy migration times. We’ll see.

AdSense

AdSense was a real beast. You can’t migrate data from one account to another, and it’s a breach of terms to have two accounts open under the same payee name unless one is business and the other is for an individual. Fine, so you close your old one and apply a new one. Kicker is, there are two hard-ass security questions they ask on the closure form:

1. Date your AdSense account first registered impressions
2. Number of impressions registered on your first day

Wait. Is that across all services, like AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, and AdSense for Feeds? Is the “first day” in the second question the same “date your AdSense account first registered impressions”, or is it the first day you opened your account (which might be “0” impressions)?

Further still, are those ad impressions or page impressions?

Poor wording.

I had to attempt to cancel my account 6 times before I found the right combination, because I’ve used all three services, starting at different times. To pull up the report necessary I reverted back to the old AdSense interface, because the new interface doesn’t allow you to generate a report for “All Time”.

From there, I was able to generate the report just for AdSense for Content (you can’t aggregate them in the old interface anyway), for All Time, and show page impressions. That gave the first date and the number of impressions that Google accepted.

Other Services

There are several things I haven’t migrated yet, like my custom search engine, but I did discover that migrating Bookmarks (which I’m not sure I’ll bother with) is going to involve exporting from Google Bookmarks to an HTML file, installing Google’s Firefox toolbar, importing the bookmarks into Firefox, and using the toolbar to pull them from Firefox to Google Bookmarks.

Mmm, naw. That’s not worth my time when I can keep use WordPress’s Links functionality to maintain a private page of my own bookmarks. Google Bookmarks was hard to navigate anyway.

I don’t typically make calls from my computer, but I do have a new-fangled “Call this number” widget in GMail now. I’m going to have to play with that.

Is It Worth It?

We’ll see how gracefully the Voice migration goes–that was the main reason I went ahead and bothered with the migration, especially since I had to rename my Google Account in order to even start the process.

I like the idea of having all my data centralized–maps, contacts, profile photo, etc. I haven’t found any Google services that I use regularly that aren’t available to me now under my Google Apps account.