We all suffer from ID proliferation these days ( facebook, hotmail, banking, gmail, etc ad infinitum )... and we are all counting on OpenID et Al to come to the rescue.

Now, there is a specific part of this problem regarding Google Accounts that is driving me mad and I think it can/should be solved through a different mechanism.

I currently have 4 Google IDs: My personal email ( aldo.bucchi@gmail.com ) and three accounts on companies using Google Apps. Of course I have already setup the necessary forwarding rules so I can live on one inbox.

But what about docs, sites, and the zillions of other Google Services?

I still need to try all four IDs to access the complete set of resources that are entitled to me but have been assigned to my different accounts for reasons that are often out of my control.

In order to solve this, Google Accounts should provide a way for me to assert that aldo.bucchi@gmail.com is the same individual as aldo.bucchi@foo.com.

Unfortunately, this is not possible today.

Well, I can't really blame it on them. Having implemented smushing on top of several legacy systems I am aware that creating and implementing the necessary indirection layer at a later point in time is not trivial and, in some cases, even impossible. In the end, it depends on the assumptions that existed when the identity framework was designed in the first place.

Hopefully Google has enough resources to pull something like this together, someday.

( I bet you they already have some account smushing working for internal and non-transactional stuff like reporting and data mining )

Google Gods: please, please... smush me!