Tag Archives: Google Apps

Why Google won’t ever get social

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Recently, Google changed their accounts infrastructure so that Google Apps accounts behave more like normal Google accounts. You’d think this would be a good thing, but it’s had a very negative unintended consequence.

Previously, you could associate multiple email addresses, including Google Apps email addresses, with a single Google Profile. This has been extremely useful, especially for using a product like Google Groups.

Their recent infrastructure change reversed all of this. Specifically, I use danielbachhuber@gmail.com to log into my Google services, but use d@danielbachhuber.com and other email addresses with my Google Groups. Because the Google Apps email addresses can no longer be associated with my primary Gmail account, I can no longer participant in the myriad of Google Groups I’m a part of. Furthermore, I have no idea where else this problem is going to manifest itself.

Google won’t ever get social because they’ve just fundamentally broken the concept of one login for multiple identities and contexts. As strongly as I am against it, this is what Twitter and Facebook are doing right.

Using Google Apps with StatusNet for email notifications

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For the sake of saving an hour of guessing, here are the proper settings for using Google Apps, or Gmail, with StatusNet, formally known as Laconica:

$config['mail']['backend'] = 'smtp';
$config['mail']['params'] = array(
'host' => 'smtp.gmail.com',
'port' => 587,
'auth' => true,
'username' => 'username@domain.com',
'password' => 'your_secret_password'
);

Adding these settings to your config.php file will allow your StatusNet instance to send email notifications over SMTP when your web host doesn’t support sending mail from the server (ahem, WebFaction). The trick is to use the proper port, 587 instead of 25, and to enable authentication.

I’m still trying to configure Google Apps as the XMPP provider for StatusNet too; I’ll put together another post if I can figure that out.