The role of a Google ID

- Earlier, we talked about brand accounts but something comes before the brand account and that's the Google ID. This is the individual ID that's associated with you, the person, and most commonly, this is first created when someone sets up a Gmail account. Now, these are the types of IDs that move across all Google services and you can use them for logging in on your tablet or mobile phones, for remote payments or accessing other Google services or perhaps you use it when you log into your email.

But, chances are, you have an ID that ties back to you and you probably established it with a phone number that you verified and the ability to provide an additional email that Google can use to contact you if there's a problem. Well, let's explore how this all ties back into YouTube. With your Google ID, it's going to serve many purposes. Essentially, it's an account that you're going to use for access and authentication to many different Google properties. So, if you're using Gmail or Google+ to email folks or connect socially, you're going to use a Google ID.

When you participate in Google Hangouts for online meetings or you upload to YouTube or you go to edit a map on Google, well, you're going to need a Google ID. Now, keep in mind that when people go to access Google properties, they might not need a Google ID. For example, if you're just going to watch content on YouTube, no big deal. You can watch as much as you want, in general and if you're going to go ahead and browse Google Maps, you don't need a Google ID. But if you want to edit that Google Map and make a change, you need a Google ID. If you want to upload to YouTube, you need a Google ID.

If you want to watch content on YouTube that's been rated for adults 18 and over, well, you need a Google ID. So, in the case of my 14-year-old son, he can watch YouTube all he wants but when he tries to watch a video that's not appropriate for a child in high school, well, it's going to flag it and require that he logs in with a Google ID which knows his age because we, as his parents, set it up. So he's unable to watch that content that's been flagged as only for those adults over the age of 18.

Now, there are all sorts of other things about Google's community standards and other things but do keep in mind that YouTube does try to protect youth by making certain videos hard to find or making it more difficult. However, of course, this doesn't counteract for the fact that people have to self select that their videos are supposed to be for this audience unless enough complaints come in. So as you get it, the Google ID is you, the individual. So if you're going to have a YouTube channel, you need a Google ID. If you're going to be uploading to YouTube, to your channel or someone else's, you need a Google ID.

Now, I probably have upwards of 20 of these through the years of all of the different Gmail accounts we've had to set up for things, but through the use of Google ID's and brand accounts, you can actually narrow down how many Google ID's you have. One Google ID can be connected to many brand accounts and this will make it a lot easier for you to manage without constantly having to log in and out of apps. Other things to keep in mind is that the Google ID can provide a publicly accessible profile. This allows other Google users to learn about you or your business.

Now, generally speaking, this is going to be you as an individual so it can include things about your website, for your personal website, contact information that you choose to share, some of your favorite photos, et cetera. But the business or brand can have it's own profile page and that's generally different. A Google profile can also be linked to other profiles on other social networking sites. So Google allows you to connect to things like Facebook, Tumblr, other blogging platforms. And many third-party services can actually use the Google ID for authentication.

This can be useful when people want to sign up for other websites or login. For example, I use Basecamp as a project management tool and I'm able to simply login with my Google ID, making it simpler so I don't have to set up yet another account, instead of managing another set of passwords. If I can access my Google device and I'm logged in, well, that gives me access to many websites and not just those owned by Google. Now, in this case, what you are seeing is a brand page.

This would be not a Google ID for an individual but rather for a company. In this case, here's an example of a brand account page. But let me show you an individual page. If I'm logged into Google, any of their websites, I can click on my profile here. And you see that I've got my Google+ profile which is one way to connect and share and people can learn about me and this is where I control what people see.

So here is my About Me page for Google and this allows you to actually see about someone. Here you can decide what information is available, which contact information you share and, as you can see, you can also include things like education and work history. You can also see where you've been a contributor to or custom URLs that you want to share and other things such as Google photo albums that you want to share or archive.

So, this makes it pretty easy for that content to be distributed. For example, you can also let other people know other cities that you've lived in. This is currently set to public. Now that same Google ID will come into play when you access other applications. For example, here I'm accessing Google Sheets on my mobile device and you'll see that several different spreadsheets here are available to me, tied to this particular account. If I tap the button here, you can see that I can have access to multiple accounts on my device.

So the same Google ID that you use on YouTube is also used on many other services. Now, if somebody were to visit your Google+ page or any other Google property and they click the About button, this is a similar thing to what they'd see. Now, this looks a lot like that page I showed you earlier for LinkedIn, but you see this is about me as an individual and they can choose to invoke things like contacting me, for a hangout, calling my cellphone or calendar, but you see in my case, I've blocked those out.

While I like getting phone calls from people I know, I choose not to let people call me directly from Google's website. But if you don't turn that option off, and you fill in your phone number, you're putting that out there for the world to see. So it's important that you take control over that page, deciding what information is available. You can have a nice bio, see additional information, and in this case, you can see additional photos that I've shown and posts that I've made on Google+. Here it's tying back to my blog, some of the content that I've re-shared on Google+ for people to enjoy.

So, you can see, for example, that it connects and starts to let you see different types of imagery. All right, this is quite useful and having that account profile is important. This is the Google ID for you as an individual. I strongly suggest that you take the time to clean up your Google ID. Now, this is a little bit beyond the focus of this class, but as you can see, it contains a lot of information about you, the individual and you should decide what you're comfortable sharing and showing.

But, fortunately, once you create a YouTube channel, this Google ID isn't really tied to the YouTube channel so it's ultimately up to you how present you are as an individual and how much visibility you take on.