Why doesn’t Google Places allow access by multiple users?

Matt's answer:

Today is more of a feature request. Um, it’s a question from the excellent Jonathan Hochman in Connecticut. Jonathan asks: “It’s not good for security when I have to ask clients to share their Google credentials with me so I can help edit their Google Places listings. Why doesn’t Google Places allow access by multiple users, like Google Webmaster Tools does?” Ok, well first off, I’m not responsible for Google Places so the best I can do is say, that’s a good feature request, I’ll pass it on to them. The way to think about these things is that typically there is a spectrum of sophistication, and how far along these things are developed. So, AdWords had the ability to you know, manage things on behalf of your clients relatively early on. Google Webmaster tools has done better about allowing delegation, but it’s still not perfect, but it’s a lot better than it was a little while ago. Google Places is even newer than Google Webmaster Tools, so it’ll probably take some time before they think about, you know, the ability to delegate, the ability to let you manage things on you’re clients behalf. Um, but just to put stuff in perspective, I was reading -Tamar Weinberg had written a letter about-she became an administrator of Fan Page on Facebook. And it looked like it was permanent; it didn’t look like you could change the administrator. So all of this stuff in my opinion, tends to get, you know from the initial stages that are a little rougher, that don’t have as fine granularity on the controls, to more advanced, more sophisticated over time. And so I do think that all of these things will get better. Um, I’ll pass that feature request on to Google Places, because we never want people to have to trade credentials. Worst case, you want to maybe allow some OAuth or something where you’re not giving out your password. Um, but at the same time the Google Places team is chugging and crunching on a bunch of other functionality. But it would be nice if something like that were offered, so I’ll pass that request on. Thank you.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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