Google has really been frustrating me lately with a lot of things, and the latest is the forced migration aka “upgrade” of Google Apps accounts to become Google Accounts.

What’s the difference between a Google Apps account and a Google Account, you ask?

Yeah, its confusing. But apparently Google Apps accounts were not Google Accounts by default, but now they will be. However, if you had an email as a Google Apps user, and that was somehow associated with a Google Account (say for accessing analytics, adsense, adwords or any other Google service) it used to be that you had to create a Google Account with that email address so you can access those services.

However, that is now changed. For people who never were Google Account holders that want to set up new access to those services, its not a big deal. For those people who had Google Accounts that had their Google Apps accounts’ email address associated with their “personal” Google Account or one that they created a gmail with (many early Google adopters fall into this category) Google forces the methodology that your gmail account is a “personal” account and your apps account is a business account. Sounds okay, right? Problem is, everything you created pre Google Apps associated with that email is now a “personal account” and when the forced Google Apps upgrade happens, all those accounts require you to switch between logins, ALL THE TIME. The multi-signon function is a pathetic work around hack. It’s all a waste of time and effort where it used to just work fairly well back then, albeit probably less seamless for Google to manage.

So what’s the solution? Move all your stuff from your “personal” Google Account to your Google Apps account. Manually. Thanks Google! Was it so hard to program a way that I could by default move everything?I guess so.

Well, so here I am moving everything. Turns out that Google Bookmarks will let you export bookmarks to an HTML file quite easily, but you can’t import them. Ugh. However, they have a way to import from Delicious, a Yahoo service. (Which was bought, and if you don’t migrate your bookmarks to the new owner, then you’ll lose those as of “July 2011″ – aka right now!)

How does this mess with you further, if you have an existing Delicious account you don’t want to mingle your Google Bookmarks with? Argh.

Want to move your personal Google Bookmarks into your Google Apps user’s Google Bookmark Accounts? Here’s how.

  1. Create a new Delicious account (or be okay with it merging with an existing one.) Turns out you can create a new Delicous account fairly easily still. It’s not tied to Yahoo so you can pick any username you want, and sign up. It might be an issue if you try to use the same email address on another account, but I just used a separate email address and created a new username.
  2. Export your Google Bookmarks from your personal account. It will create an HTML file and save this to your computer.
  3. In Delicous, go to “import bookmarks“ and you can upload that HTML file plus pick from a few settings. I recommend using the “email me when done” option, but you don’t have to. Import the bookmarks.
  4. Important! Wait 10-15 minutes or until you get the email saying your import is complete. It can take a little bit of time so be patient. Either wait for the email, or look at the account and see if the number of imported bookmarks is accurate. Waiting for the email is the best bet, especially if you have a large amount of bookmarks.
  5. Sign in to your new Google Apps user account and go to Google Bookmarks. It should be empty unless you’ve already added some bookmarks or imported them from other sources.
  6. Go to Import Bookmarks in the left sidebar. Once you load that page, you’ll see the only import option is from Delicious. (How stupid is that? You can export to HTML, but you can’t import from HTML. Doh!)
  7. On the import page, select the right hand side option which is to sign in with your newly created Delicious account.
  8. When you sign in, Google will pull the bookmarks from Delicious and show you a list of the bookmarks. You can deselect the ones you don’t want to import.
  9. Finalize the list of bookmarks to import. Now you’re done. If you want to, you can go clean up the tags/labels as there are a few things added like “imported” and “delicous_export” – at least those tags/labels were added to mine. I was also missing a number of labels that I had created, since I think the Delicous import doesn’t pull all the tags from the Google Export or Google doesn’t provide them. But at least I have the bookmarks moved over, and I can re-label them or just search through them if need be.
  10. Delete your newly created Delicious account, if you don’t want it hanging around. If you delete it, you can almost immediately create it again using the same username should you need to do the import again.

Let me know if this works for you. It was pretty much seamless for me.