Google offers its users a lot of facilities like a fantastic search engine, an even better Gmail, Google Talk, Online community - Orkut and lot more. To have a synchronisation with all these services Google uses a single user account for all Google services for a user. i.e with the gmail account infromation you can sing up with orkut, or talk in Google Talk or log in to the personalised home page of Google search.
In other words signing in to one account means all the other open automaitcally. For example after logging on the Google Talk you can read mails directly without logging in again by clicking the new mail indicator to the bottom of the window. This also means that signing out of Gmail does to essentially close your Google account. You have to sign out completely.
This is very important when you are accesing the interntet from a public place like an internet cafe. An open account can be operated by anyone and can cause anything. So you have to make sure that before you leave, you have logged out of all the individual services.
To ensure this just go to the homepage of the services you have used. For eg. If you used Gmail, then try going to Gmail.com. If the page asks you the username and password, then you have logged out. If you havent logged out you will be direcly taken to your inbox.
Take care.b
