So this will just become the place lusers ask questions about the Google API?  Way over our heads...

I recently upgraded Chromium from some PPA and was asked to set the following:
export GOOGLE_API_KEY="api_key"
export GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID="client_id"
export GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET="client_secret"

I followed the instructions best I could, but am unable to "sign in to Chrome"  How can I debug this?

From an OS perspective I can locate the entries in /proc/`pidof chromeium`/enviornment and they are correct.