Here's another difference between Apple and Google: Apple makes beautiful computers, and Google makes computers disposable. Check out this ChromeOS commercial. I actually recoiled watching the coffee, toaster, sink, and ice cream sundae land on the notebooks in this video and destroy them. Zero data loss is great, but I also love keeping and caring for devices I love.

Got to talk about Google TV, Android tablets, Google bonuses and more with Jeff, Leo, and our guest Joel Johnson this week on TWiG. I was quieter than usual, working on only a couple hours of shuteye after my trip back from DC, but these guys always keep me on my feet.

Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The Real Life Social Network." The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.

According to Adams, the biggest problem for users on social networks like Facebook is that all your "friends" are in one big bucket. Unlike real life, there's no way to differentiate how you act and interact with different groups of people in your life. When you go to Mom's house on Thanksgiving you behave differently than when you're at Hooters with your college friends, but online all those people appear on a single friends list.

Adams also differentiates between strong ties (the 2-4 people you call on the phone at least once a week), weak ties (friends of friends, the co-worker who's two cubicles down) and temporary ties (the person you're buying a cup of coffee from). Collapsing all these different groups and relationships into a single context--like Facebook--and combining them with the permanence of the internet can lead to a lot of awkward situations. Like Debbie, the girls swim coach who realized, to her horror, that her 10-year-old swimmers could see her commenting on wild photos from the gay bar where her adult friends work.

The entire slideshow is embedded above. Adams also compiled reference links in a blog post here: The data behind The Real Life Social Network.

Update: After I published this post, Google added very strong language to that form insisting that transfers to GApps accounts are NOT SUPPORTED (caps theirs). I'm not sure why it worked for Dustin and myself. Your mileage may vary.

Even though this request form says it doesn't work for Google Apps accounts, I can confirm that Google is transferring Google Voice from regular Google accounts to Google Apps accounts right now. Thanks to a comment by reader Dustin Boston, I gave it a try this afternoon and within the hour, my Google Voice number, texts, and voicemail was ported to my Google Apps account. If you try this, a couple of things to know:

• You'll have to enter your 4-digit PIN into the request form. I forgot mine, had to reset it, got it wrong the first time, got a message saying so, reset it again, and then all worked. Write down your PIN. It's only 4 digits.
• You'll have to re-record your Google Voice name and greeting(s). They don't get ported.
• I maintain an Apps contact list, so this didn't really affect me, but Dustin recommends exporting your Google account contacts before the transfer so you can import them into your Voice account.

Here's the form to request the transfer [removed]. Even though it does say it doesn't work for Google Apps accounts, it did work for Dustin and myself.

On this week's episode of TWiG, Leo, Jeff, and I were hoping aloud that there would be some way to merge existing Google/Apps accounts into one. It doesn't look like that will be possible. However, if you have a Google account that "conflicts" with your Apps account because you've assigned the same email address to both, GOOG will resolve the conflict by adding a +personal to your regular account's sign-in address. Stay with me here.

Here's what that means. If you have a Google account for sue@example.com as well as a Google Apps account for sue@example.com, after the transition you'll still be able to sign into your Google account using sue+personal@example.com. It's a bit confusing, and a little more work than the one-click account merge we'd hoped for. However, thanks in large part to Google's internal Data Liberation Front, many of Google's tools offer data export features. So, while it'll take some time, it shouldn't be difficult to export your data from your Google account and import it into your Google Apps account after this transition is done.

The only product I'm worried about? Google Voice. Since it's got my primary phone number associated with it, transitioning it from my Google account to my Google Apps account won't be a simple data export/import operation. I hope I'll be able to port my Voice number from my original account to my Google Apps account when all this goes down. No word on when exactly that will be, but the fact that it's in Trusted Tester phase means "pretty dang soon."

Update: Hooray!! You can currently request to port your Google Voice account to another Google account (though not a Google Apps account--yet?) Thanks, programzeta!

About the conversion: A visualization on what's changing [Google Accounts Help]

If you've taken the leap and hosted your domain email with Google Apps, no doubt you've noticed that you miss out on services that regular Gmail accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Analytics, and right now, Buzz.

After complaining about the disparities on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a helpful Googler unofficially got in touch to clarify and confirm the problem. Let's call her/him "Helpful McGoogler." Here's what HM said.

To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there's only one kind of account: a Google Account.

Helpful McGoogler explains:

Abstract the idea of a "Google Account" from being associated with Gmail or Google Apps. You can tie ANY email address to a "Google Account."

Check out https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and notice that it asks you for your "current email address." So let's say I go to school at Big University and I have an email address helpfulmcgoogler@biguni.edu... I can use that email address while signing up and that will be my login name to access Google services.

Some of the confusion that leads to "you must have a gmail.com address" to access Google services is because a Google Account comes "for free" when you open a Gmail account. So using a Gmail address always just works.

Google Apps accounts provide a subset of Google services hosted for your domain. You get some, but not all of what vanilla Google accounts get.

Helpful McGoogler says:

When you open a Google Apps domain account. You are essentially creating a branded Google Account world for the Google services your domain is hosting. You can see your services at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[domain.name]/Dashboard.

So, let's say you have a Google Apps domain that is example.com and you created a user gina@example.com. You will be able to log in with gina@example.com for all your Google Apps hosted services. Typically this is email, Docs, Calendar, and Contacts... but you can click the "add more services" link to expand that. Right now, you won't find stuff like Reader, Google Voice, AdWords, Finance, Analytics, etc... but still there is some interesting stuff in there.

But what if you want to access ALL services through a single email address?

Helpful McGoogler says:

What you do is create a NORMAL Google Account (described at the beginning) and associate it with your gina@example.com email address. That "vanilla" google account will now have access to all (well, I think all) Google services. You can have a Reader account, a Voice account, an Analytics account, etc all associated with your non-gmail address. It can even have the same password--but it doesn't need to--to make it seem like it's the same account... but in reality, it's a very separate account.

Still, this just means you have two different Google accounts, with different Contacts and Calendar and Google Docs data on each. Google Apps accounts provides a subset of the services you get with a regular Google Account, and so having a GApps account duplicates those datastores. This is the scenario I complained about on TWiG.

Helpful McGoogler acknowledges that this is indeed a problem:

Here is a scenario that really trips people up... Let's say you are using your gina@example.com email and are all happy
that you have your Contacts all in-line and organized and filled out. Now you go and create a vanilla Google Account using your gina@example.com email address (mostly because you want to use Google Voice and Google Reader with the same log-in as your Apps account—btw, this was totally me a couple years ago). When you set up something like Google Voice, you will expect your Contacts to be full of all the goodness you set up in your gina@example.com "hosted Gmail" instance... you will be disappointed to find your Contacts are empty.

This is because the vanilla Google Account that is being used for Google Voice will be accessing a DIFFERENT "Contacts" service which has no data (sadness). My ugly solution was to initially export the contacts from my Google Apps Account and import them to my Google vanilla Account and try to keep them in sync when I make edits.

This double set of Contacts especially stinks for Android users who sign into Android with their Google Apps account, because your Google Contacts and Calendar are baked into your phone setup.

Helpful McGoogler is with me on this:

When you add Android into the mix, Contacts get weird. Because, I think, you can add your Google Apps account to Android and not your gina@example.com "vanilla" Google Account. (GT: Yes, this is true.) But, when you sign in to Google Voice on Android, you will need to enter the password (which might be the same) of your vanilla Google Account. BUT, on Android, your Contacts are read from the system's phone book. Not necessarily the vanilla Google Voice Google Account that has its separate contacts (accessible through the normal Google Voice webapp). Ugh. The "Contacts" issue is by far the most 'hurting' in this whole scenario.

Yup. Calendar is also an issue.

I thought this was the full extent of the problem, so it's nice to have even unofficial confirmation from the horse's mouth. Helpful McGoogler DID say s/he thought the teams at Google are aware of the issue and are working to address it. It also sounds like some bits of Android need to get refactored to work seamlessly with both vanilla Google accounts and Google Apps accounts.

After that episode of TWiG aired, at least three listeners emailed me saying they use third-party service Soocial to sync Contacts across their multiple Google/Google Apps accounts. I haven't tried this myself--and you may have to enter your Google account password into Soocial to set it up, which is a big red flag--but it's something.

Are you having the Google Apps account dilemma? What are you doing to deal with it? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Google Apps user Matt Jacob explains his frustrations with the Google (Apps) account dichotomy. I love how he refers to Google Apps accounts (lowercase a) versus Google Accounts (uppercase A). Clearly FREE vanilla Google Accounts get more preference than potentially-paid Google Apps accounts, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Google says it's taking "a new approach to China" and will stop censoring search results there, even if it means they have to shut down Google.cn and their China offices. The announcement is a huge deal, and it set off some fantastic insta-commentary from tech writers on Twitter. My favorite, shown above, is courtesy of Joel Johnson. More inside.

Most people's reactions were emotional, proud, celebratory:

Others dug deeper or cracked jokes.

From a friend who shall remain nameless because her/his tweets are protected:

From an obvious Microsoft-lover:

Chinese tech writer Jacqui Cheng had the most insightful bits of the bunch. So you don't have to read her tweets backward, she said:

# The Google/China thing is so much bigger than Google just deciding to stop censoring. That's small beans compared to the big picture.
# Basically, Google thinks the Chinese gov could be behind these attacks, attempting to use Google as a pawn to get info on detractors...
# ...and is saying so without actually saying so.
# The wording is very careful and calculated in that sense. Not to mention that others have suspected the same for a long time.

Finally, Cheng's prediction on how this will play out:

# China will tell Google to suck it and Google will pull out, and America will forget all about it in a week.

If you want more than 140 characters, here's The New York Times' first take on the news.