I was late to the gmail party. Somehow I believed that paying Steve J $99 a year for my mac.com email address (it’s a good one!) would last me forever. So when I finally saw the light, I couldn’t get a decent gmail address.

Google Apps for my domain was the lifesaver. petedavies.com became available and I was able to use gmail with an email address that bore some resemblance to my name.

But Google Apps has never really played that nicely with personal google accounts. Some services simply weren’t available (Voice, Reader, etc.) others would just never play nicely and got confused if you ran them both in the same browser. Multiple logins helped, as did the slow transition of the major products to being available to apps users. Some things (Adwords, Adsense) still refuse to play nicely across multiple accounts.

So I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the last year trying to consolidate all my Google services under one the one Google Apps account, believing that Google is fully invested in making it’s newest, sparkliest features available to both personal account holders and Google Apps users.

Ehh not so much:

In order to transition my Google Voice account, I had to fill out a nondescript form with my request. A couple of days later I got an email confirmation. Will the same happen with this? Should I even bother to reactivate a personal google account that I’ve spent the better part of the last two years trying to retire?