Google's statement is obvious bullshit, and
here's why. The way you "support" pseudonyms is as
follows:
1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect
that the name they are using is not their legal
name.
2. There is no step 2.
UPDATE: Also, Google hasn't "relaxed" their policy. The name(s) you choose are still passing a review process and once a name is "flagged" you'll have to provide evidence that the name(s) in question represents you and is an "established identity".
And for example, in case the name represents an online identity, you have to have a "meaningful following" -- basically, there can be only one +Madonna, except these aren't random/made-up user handles, such as on Twitter.
Also, most importantly, Google+ still bans anonymity.
UPDATE 2: I was partly mistaken in my conclusions. See comments by @ElbertF below.
This policy is even worse than deleting users accounts for obvious non-real names:
"we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name."
The whole point of a nickname/handle/etc is to disconnect it from your real identity. Google wants Google+ to be a phonebook connecting people to their semi-anonymous nicks?
Google can go fuck themselves. Thankfully all of the hot girls are still using Twitter and FB; I'll stick with those and leave the geeky stuff to semi-anonymous participation on the internet's various sub-communities.
My biggest practical issue¹ with G+ has always been that I could never recognise any of the people in my circles because they used their real names instead of the names I knew them by. As long as I can see people's nicknames and figure out who I'm talking with, I can grudgingly put up with the rest.
¹: As opposed to philosophical issues like centralisation or privacy.
Ideally I'd prefer that people be authentic if possible, but I know in the real world there are various problems that makes this not always possible. I'd push for these problems to be fixed too.
Yonatan Zunger (who works on Google+) posted this in a comment:
"Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this."
I recently make a new google+ account with a handle name (obviously wasn't a real name), got a huge number of +1's with a public post and then google stepped in and said they'd remove my account if I didn't use a real name. So, I used a random name, and then "approved it". How is a fake name better than a handle of some sort? It isn't. Google's position is just dumb.
"The other important thing it’s trying to catch is people who are creating individual accounts, rather than +Pages, for non-human entities such as businesses or organizations. The behavior of +Pages is deliberately restricted in the system, and we don’t want people to be creating fake human accounts to circumvent that. The name check turns out to be a very powerful tool to catch these."
That's refreshing to know, however I feel that it should be clearly mentioned in their names policy.
Also, I take away from this quote that an account such as Fake Steve Jobs would not be allowed, right? Daniel Lyons, the editor behind the Fake Steve identity, revealed himself after 14 months and his anonymity was pretty cool.
From the same comment (no way to link to it directly):
"The other case is people such as +trench coat, who are so well-known under this handle that it would be bizarre not to let them onto the system under this name. For this case, we allow appeals based on being well-known under the name: thus the ability to prove the 'established pseudonym.'"
This is not really sufficient. Anyone who does not have an established handle needs to spend a year or so acquiring a following under some other services in order to be good enough for Google Plus. Consider, for example, kids who want to create their first pseudonym. This kind of policy very much pushes them toward using their real names, arguably at the time in their life when it is worst to do so.
What is in the law is an onus of responsiblity on service providers like Google to protect people under 13. So the response of Google/Facebook etc.. simply make it part of their terms that children cannot use their services - and will be summarily deleted if they do. (Google policy not 'the law').
Net result is parents help their kids online by showing them how to lie about their age. Google's ass remains covered but they are not able to actually protect kids because they don't know their ages.
Which law? I'm not American so I'm not familiar with this. But there's certainly plenty of kids on other sites that are used for communications, so what makes Google delete kids' accounts?
The tldr is that it's a notoriously difficult law to comply with unless (1) your site has limited userbase or functionality, or (2) you delete children's accounts on sight.
I haven't read through COPPA, but I believe that Google, as a US company, has to abide by COPPA restrictions, regardless of where they're storing data. (It might even apply to non-US users...) As the user above pointed out, COPPA is really, really hard to 'get around.'
I've always been confused by this. Does "as a US company" mean that it's HQ is in the US? Or that it is incorporated in the US? Or just that it does business in the US?
1) As long as this is not clearly spelled out in the TOS _and_ you trust the company (again?) to keep it up, without changing it back in the future, you could now go with a fake name. You'd invest in a social network that asked for IDs in the past to get access to the data you created on their platform and wouldn't be able to provide an ID to get to the data for this account, even if you'd wanted to.
2) The criteria are still unclear. At what point does it stop looking like my real name? Should I play safe and go with John Smith? Is that maybe already very suspicious and probably not my name, period? How creative can I get choosing the required fake name without triggering this alarm that would block my profile?
3) This defeats the whole purpose of the policy in the first place. A "real name policy" (call it community guidelines or whatever, if you like) only makes sense if you verify the names. Otherwise it is a 'no funny names' (what's considered funny?) or 'no offensive names' (recently mentioned on Raymond Chen's blog: Microsoft changed the internal abbreviation of customer from 'cu' to 'cx', because the former is an offensive word in Portuguese.. Where's the limit?) policy.
For all intents and purposes: There is _zero_ progress here, and it really took them a loooong time to add an additional simple field to their data model, plus two options on how you want to render it on your profile.
And - nicknames are only useful for searching/lookups. I can put them up in my 'about' section. Google is a _search company_. I doubt that it was impossible to find people that wrote 'Hey, this is MikeMasterOfGuitarHero' anywhere near their profile by knowing that particular name. But being _only_ available using a name that you pick yourself - that's still missing.
This is about setting the tone. Real-sounding fake identities may be tolerated because Google currently can't/won't check every user, but Yonatan Zunger isn't speaking for the company, especially when he disagrees with their official policy. Even then, that concession makes pseudonyms second-class citizens which can be deleted if they are too obvious.
My reading of Google's new policy is that you can't be cuddlybunny1984, but you can be "Cuddly Bunny" or +cuddlybunny1984. Furthermore, if you have a government ID that says your name is cuddlybunny1984, then you can be that too. The goal, I'm assuming, is to prevent the site from looking like Xanga.
(To be honest, I do find it really weird to be using my real name online. "Jonathan has shared XXX" sounds stupid to me, because nobody in real life calls me Jonathan. But that's how I write my first name.
I would prefer "jrockway has shared XXX", since that is more "me" than a first name that 239483 other people have.)
> If we challenge the name you intend to use, you will be asked to submit proof that this is an established identity with a meaningful following. You can do so by providing links to other social networking sites, news articles, or official documents in which you are referred to by this name. Note that this name and your profile must represent you, and not an avatar or other secondary online identity. Profane or offensive names are not allowed.
seems to be the one concession from their policy so far (I consider linking pseudonyms to the real name a screw-you more than a concession).
I'm not sure how established Cuddly Bunny would have to be, but that person would have to work at their identity on a more tolerant site for some time, at which point Google+ needs them more than they do. Hopefully these friendlier sites won't follow Google and Facebook's lead.
Hopefully these friendlier sites won't follow Google and Facebook's lead.
This is weird, isn't it. It makes me wonder what problem Google and Facebook are trying to solve with "social networking". They're basically sites that you go to because you're you, rather than other sites on the Internet that you go to because the content interests you. The rest of the Internet doesn't care what your name is. If you abuse your posting privileges (or whatever), you just get banned, end of story.
Not that Google can do anything here, but personally while I am not for real name policies, I do want the problems with using real names be fixed if possible.
I must negotiate with nosy, judgmental primates to obtain food and shelter. I'm all for fixing that, but in the meantime, I don't put anything substantive and controversial on the permanent record for my True Name.
So Google suddenly can't handle some spam filtering? If I go log into my gmail account right now, am I going to find all the spam dumped in my inbox? And has the webspam team resigned en masse?
Where did this sudden bout of incompetence come from, exactly?
People tend to think Google is just its frontend. They see pictures of people and some blog-like comments and say, "I could have written that over the weekend!" Then, since they don't know how to solve the spam problem, they think that Google doesn't know how to solve the spam problem either. As it turns out, Google does have some spam-fighting ideas. Some things slip through the cracks, of course, but the algorithms are always getting better.
A pseudonym system is ripe for abuse. I can certainly understand why Google would be adverse to implementing it. If not being able to use a pseudonym is a gamebreaker for someone, they should not be using Google+.
Side note: I respect jwz, but I can't take anyone who says "Fuck those guys, seriously" seriously.
Yeah, but this is Google. They should know better, especially considering how they are integrating Google+ in search results.
Twitter does this much better. They allow people to be whatever/whomever they want. But in case YOUR identity is important to you and your following, then you can get your account verified: https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/...
Well, Twitter isn't providing this to the public anymore. Mostly because they are saying that the surest way to prove legitimacy is to link to your Twitter account from your website, or other properties.
Isn't this so much better?
It is better and I'll tell you why. This G+ policy won't stop bogus accounts because Google can't verify all the accounts created. But guess who'll get hurt - it won't be the spammers that sell viagra.
"Yeah, but this is Google. They should know better,"
What should they know better? What's the downside to Google from any names policy they've stated or implemented since they started? None to their bottom line is my assumption.
How does a few disgruntled hippies (I'm one) with non-Wasp names compare against the bottom line value of total information awareness?
I disagree. Here's the scenario I envision with spammers on G+. Tell me if you see it differently because I could certainly be missing an angle.
1. Spammer signs up with fake name (something like John Smith) and either has no profile picture or some picture pulled off Google.
2. Spammer adds users to their circles.
3. Users see the circle request, but, since this is just some random person adding them, they don't reciprocate.
In this interaction, spammers don't have an avenue of communication except via their username. If they could use a pseudonym, their username could be www.getcheapp1llz-ezi.ly, which would be as effective a way as ever to get people to go to their site.
On a site like twitter, where usernames are not limited by any criteria that I'm aware of, the spammer would have the medium of username as a communication method.
Now how much of this is relevant to modern times, where spammers are mainly working on SEO for spam websites? I don't know.
For what it's worth, I know a few people on G+ who clearly have a pseudonym as their name and they haven't been banned yet.
So because a spammer could use a data field as a method of communication, we should screen every possible entry in that data field? Perhaps G+ should substitute all comment boxes with dropdown menus... Seriously, this has nothing to do with spam and everything to do with preserving real identities, which have more value to Google's expected future revenue model.
Unverified usernames do not inevitably result in a site that is overrun by spam. Time-tested methods of downvoting, flagging, reporting, and semi-automated filtering can quickly dispatch such shell accounts. You only need to look to reddit for proof of this--a site where users sometimes employ their username as the punchline to the joke. That's right, a username can be an avenue of communication in itself that carries positive, non-spammy (and dare I say fun?) results. Another example: would @shitmydadsays have caught on fire the way it did if the account was named +Justin Halpern instead? I doubt it. The final obvious example: HN, which thankfully does not require "verified" identities.
When I read discourses from Google like the OP's it reminds me how right moot is when he says that creativity is only preserved in a culture that values privacy and anonymity. When everybody is permanently attached to every action, nobody bothers to test the norms, and all that's left is consumption of "safe" content from centralized producers. Of course that's what Google and Facebook, being glorified advertising networks, actually want. Your anonymous account has no money to buy anything, no predictable real-world holdings or credit score or behavior, and therefore no value to an advertiser.
Perhaps G+ should substitute all comment boxes with dropdown menus
It would help with data hygiene. It would also integrate nicely with a no-keyboard computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA "The aardvark admitted its fault."
A strategy that will work much better for spammers (and I guarantee that you'll see it in action) is temporary identity theft:
1) spammer picks someone popular, signs-up with
similar name + similar picture
2) spammer starts following the same people and
some of those people will follow back
3) spammer starts spamming
4) Google notices and bans account after some time
5) repeat from step 1
Also, there are plenty of spammers on G+ already. Twitter is much more aggressive in dealing with spammers.
You don't even need to pick somebody popular, although I suppose it might make certain things easier. If you pick a plausible name and an attractive-looking profile picture, after a few hundred requests to people in the same location, you will have plenty of followers. Perhaps bootstrap with relationships amongst your bots so your profile doesn't look conspicuously vacant. It's not only spammers that do this... guess what, law enforcement does it too. Social networks have not changed how gullible the average internet user is.
Systems are "ripe for abuse" in proportion to their expressive power. Consequently, any really great system will have this property.
Google understood this when they went into the Gmail business and found a place where their analytic talent was well-employed.
Google should focus on finding ways that they can contribute to others' success (their billions of users, current and potential) instead of trying to find ways to corral and leverage their users as part of a grand strategy.
I'm trans and am from an abusive family that has stalked and harassed me on more than one occasion. Being pseudonymous allows me to communicate with people who I do care about without worrying about being outed and/or stalked again.
A "real name system" is ripe for abuse. One can imagine everything from states starting demand people use them, corporations surveiling those who use them and people squatting and abusing the "real name" accounts of others.
First of all, we do have a "real name" system in use offline ("legal name"), and effectively online when it comes to anything credit-card linked as well.
As for squatting, that only works if you assume the real names are enforced to be unique, which I don't think anyone has suggested will happen. The only group that does that (as far as I know) is SAG and similar unions.
I'm normally a massive Google fanboy, but I quit using Google+ because I find the no-pseudonyms policy unacceptably discriminatory[1], and I don't think this announcement really makes a difference to that. Non-Anglo-Saxon names will continue to be routinely flagged as fake, and people who want a persistent identity unlinked to details that could expose them in real life be continue to be unable to use the service.
In short, Google allows cosmetic pseudonyms, which is great, but they didn't remove any restrictions that made the no-pseudonyms policy obnoxious in the first place. I'm hopeful that the "first steps" they refer to this as presage changes that will make the service more inclusive (and I can go back to my usual unthinking approval of the company).
[1] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea... -- originally I said I found it "racist and sexist", but it's not confined to racism and sexism - pretty much everyone who suffers from disadvantage is further disadvantaged by Google's stance.
I hate this "anglo-saxon" meme. The head of Google+ has an Indian name. His boss has a Russian name. And Google+ seems to be going strong in Asia, with names like สมนึกน้อย or 盧小小.
Could you please write "unconventional" instead?
There are good and coherent arguments for allowing anonymity and strong pseudonyms, but the accusations of racism and sexism are definitely not among them.
You're quite right that "Anglo-Saxon" doesn't quite cover it, there are definitely users with Anglo-Saxon names (ones made from words in the dictionary, usually) who've fallen afoul of the naming policy. In my far-from-comprehensive experience, people who've put their names in non-Latin scripts have a higher suspend rate. It's not really amenable to statistical evidence, I agree, but that's the crux of my racism claim. If you don't agree with my anecdotal observation, that's fine, but it's made in good faith.
I am far unhappier writing "unconventional" (though users with unconventional names have been banned) because it reinforces the idea that the "convention" is Latin script. This is not the case for a huge portion of the world.
As for the accusations of sexism (and also homophobia, transphobia etc. that I didn't mention), the page I linked went into some detail about why members of some disadvantaged groups would be further disadvantaged by the name policy. Were there concrete rebuttals you wanted to make to them? I use "sexist" in the structural sense of disadvantaging (maybe indirectly) women on average more than men rather than imagining Gundotra and Horowitz waking up each morning thinking "how can we keep the wimminz down today?"
I quit G+ because it's much easier to violate the terms of service on G+, and because they also take away your Gmail access when you violate the terms, and when you get down to it I need Gmail more. Ironic, I suppose.
> they also take away your Gmail access when you violate the terms
Are you sure? This seems to be a persistent rumor, but other than COPA-mandated takedowns of accounts belonging to children, I haven't seen any such reports like that which stood up to scrutiny.
"Non-Anglo-Saxon names will continue to be routinely flagged as fake"
Please read through Yonatan Zunger's comments on the original post - in particular "Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this."
There was a lot of research done to understand what names "look like" around the world and for many different cultures. There was also work to make sure that the human review process had both reviewers in place from the various cultures and that there was an effective process in place to make sure that reviews were routed appropriately.
"people who want a persistent identity unlinked to details that could expose them in real life be continue to be unable to use the service"
Google+ will no longer require you to provide your real or legal name. Just something that looks like a name. Were you asking for something more?
Thanks for the explanation and for pointing out Yonatan Zunger's comments: I hadn't seen them when I made my post and they paint the new policy in a much more positive light.
I understand that Google did a lot of research in designing the real names policy, and that there are culturally aware teams implementing them. I don't really understand how they determine what's a likely-looking name--even in English, there are a great number of naming cultures: I would imagine the name StJohn Fetherstonhaugh looks as unlikely to an American as Page Lane does to someone from England, but both are "real" names. Would they be routed to the same team?
When you broaden this to the entire world, my confidence in Google's ability to do what is effectively a tedious customer service job falters, especially when you consider that the exact spelling of one's name can be a contentious issue in some parts of the world if one identifies as a particular ethnicity.
What more would I like? I'd like Yonatan Zunger's explanation to be made official policy; I'd also like to know what would happen if I sign up as Fifi Trixibelle Honeyblossom Peaches Pixie Heavenly Hiranni Tigerlily[0] Harlow (not my real name, but equally obviously someone's real name, and thus "name-shaped"), and I'm flagged what recourse I have that doesn't involve changing my name on Google+.
Personally, I would love to see Yonatan's explanations be made more official. I don't know if there are any plans for that (I write code for a living, I'm not in PR :-) )
Yonatan has a great thread going on in his personal account where he is responding to questions from users. He is the primary architect of both G+ and the new policy. I would recommend reading through it and posting your questions there (https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/YJbz...)
I know that the team would appreciate real-world examples of names that are edge cases, or that would likely be false-positives in the current system.
As far as how they determine what it means to be "name-shaped", I'll just copy one of Yonatan's responses. I really recommend reading through the thread.
"OK, and now to answer the really damned tough question of "just how the heck do you define name-shapedness?" And I can't go in to too many of the technical details, but the zeroth-order answer is "using humans, boosted by computers." Humans look at names and flag things which look like they aren't names; anything which is flagged gets reviewed by lots more humans, cross-checked, vetted by people with cultural familiarity, etc. This process tries to err on the side of treating things as OK. (!) We also build up computer models to basically cache this and handle the "easy" cases automatically, since obviously having humans do everything doesn't scale. The goal is that most things which are marked as "not a name" are genuinely cases of something being meant as either a nickname or an organization; whenever the appeals process is triggered, and even more so whenever something passes an appeal, that's a sign that the first-stage check failed and we need to improve our rules. So then we can look at the pattern of appeals, see if there are classes of names which we are systematically getting wrong, and learn from this to improve the process and reduce the chance of someone being sent through it incorrectly."
Google+ is not, however, accepting new pseudonyms. This is designed for “established ones.” Horowitz explained that the new account naming option is intended for “people who have earned credit in other social systems and want to redeem that credit in Google+”.
This is really important since you have to fill out a Google+ profile when you sign up for a Gmail account. I can't believe they would throw away the ability to make an anonymous email account.
If you'll read the announcement, it's pretty clear that Google+ names must pass a review process. And in case the name is "flagged", then you must provide:
- References to an established identity offline in
print media, news articles, etc
- Scanned official documentation, such as a
driver’s license
- Proof of an established identity online with a
meaningful following
By giving a bogus name, you'll end up losing your online Google+ identity and access to other Google services, such as Gmail.
You could argue that they should be supporting accounts for kids under 13 with parental permission (like Yahoo does, for instance), but that's not the same thing.
Edit: and to preempt some class of responses: yes, as has been covered on HN before, COPPA has a clause that says not to warn users that setting their age to under 13 will prevent them from accessing content, and that you can't (generally) let them go back and change it later.
I don't understand. It is an argument for diversifying providers for email, social networking, etc, but, in this case, gmail/COPPA requires you to be over 13, so if google knows (or thinks it knows) a user is under 13, this does seem like the expected outcome. Am I missing your point?
Google is a single company, and just finds it easier to ban you completely from their entire network than to let you have access in piecemeal to certain services.
A company can't ban a user from one service because they believe they're underage (to comply with COPA), then pretend to not know they should be banned from other services of the company where COPA would also apply.
It's not "easier" to do that, it's just what you have to do since it's so difficult to make any social / messaging service COPA-compliant.
Yahoo will let you create the account, but then you'll have to go through a whole set of other steps to create a COPPA-compliant email account, including having a parent provide a credit card.
That's different from how they would handle it if they had an existing account on Yahoo Mail and found out that the owner was less than 13 - I suspect they would have to turn it off as well, because they won't let you create a non-COPPA account once you've admitted you're under 13.
You don't need to know any special URLs either. All you have to do is stop the signup process after your Gmail account is created (step 1) but before you create your Google+ profile (step 2).
Google owes its users a better explanation for why they require a real name (or real sounding name). The should go farther than just "make google like the real world". What are the benefits? Who is it really benefiting--the users or Google?
Since that's been the problem the whole time, why is the supposed magical "it's fixed!" announcement buried in some unofficial comment?
Google isn't exactly a babe in the woods anymore, they know better than this, why is everything around Google+ policy issues being handled in such a half-assed, tone-deaf manner?
Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree, but I wouldn't characterize a public post by the Product VP for Google+ as an unofficial comment that's buried.
I'm sorry that the handling has come across as tone-deaf. From my perspective the leadership had a strong vision for the product and had some strongly held assumptions and opinions about how best to achieve that vision.
I see today's announced change as evidence that the leadership is listening to the feedback and looking at data and then re-checking some of their basic assumptions and adjusting.
There is - of course - plenty of room to disagree. I'm not trying to get in an argument here, or to re-hash the arguments that have been going on within the company. I'm just an engineer that cares about the product and I'm trying to provide information and answer some questions
This is kind of the point, actually. Or perhaps a side-effect of it. You (that is, Googlers in general) live in a bubble where that sort of information becomes common knowledge. You have large quantities of context unavailable to the outside world, and seem utterly unable, at least when it comes to Google+, to step outside of that context and figure out how to communicate with people outside of Google who have a billion other things to worry about in the ordinary course of their lives that are far more important to them than Google.
> From my perspective the leadership had a strong vision for the product and had some strongly held assumptions and opinions about how best to achieve that vision.
This is more indication of the bubble. Google's leadership may have had such a vision, and may have communicated it with some clarity internally, but it was not communicated to the outside world.
By and large you guys have huge brains, but you need to shut them off for a minute. Read about Google+ from the perspective of what you probably consider to be a stupid person. Notice how nothing makes sense. Then realize that the "stupid" person you're envisioning is actually the 7 billion people on Earth who do not have the context of working at Google.
To make sure we're clear - I'm an engineer and I spend my days writing code. I'm not in PR.
Also, I appreciate the dialogue and the discussion. I hope I don't come across as defensive or argumentative. My specialty is writing code, not communicating with the public :-)
We all live in bubbles of various sorts. Working at Google is clearly a bubble of a sort. A lot of more information gets shared internally than gets released publicly. As a mild digression - sometimes it gets hard to keep track of what information is private and what has been shared publicly. I think most of us err on the side of caution and default to talking less than more.
"figure out how to communicate with people outside of Google who have a billion other things to worry about in the ordinary course of their lives that are far more important to them than Google"
This is where I'm sure there is a lot of ground for debate on how an announcement like this should have been made.
On one hand, I could argue that - given that there are a lot of people that could care less about Google, or about this announcement - posting it on Google+ was exactly the right thing to do, since the announcement was about Google+.
After all - HN is itself a big bubble and there are plenty of topics that people within the HN bubble care passionately about but that people outside of this particular bubble care much less about <shrug>. The G+ names policy is (IMO) one of those issues. It's a topic that people seem to either be really passionate about, or completely indifferent. I'd say the portion that care passionately is over-represented in the HN community (for the record - there are probably even a higher percentage that are passionate about it within the company. This was, and is, a hotly debated topic internally).
I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong about whether making this particular announcement on G+ was the best move - just that I think it was a reasonable one.
"Google's leadership may have had such a vision, and may have communicated it with some clarity internally"
It wasn't really messaged much differently or with much more clarity within the company, as far as I can tell.
My perspective comes more from having a front-row seat for watching the sausage being made :-) (obviously this is something that is hard to scale)
There is - unfortunately - very little hard science or hard data available for how to put together a product like G+. A lot of it comes down to having a vision, making some assumptions and trying to build a product around those. And then paying attention to what happens.
There have been plenty of decisions about the design and policies surrounding G+ that I haven't agreed with over time. What I have respected, though, is the fact that the team and the leadership have listened and have paid attention and have made course corrections as things have developed.
There have been more of those that we got to witness while the product was still in internal-only beta. This is kind-of the first significant course correction that is publicly visible. I'm sure it won't be the last.
I've also observed during the making of G+ that it can be easy to posit ulterior motives to people when they are making decisions that just seem so wrong to you. I've been guilty of this myself :-) Over time, Vic/Brad/Yonatan/et al. have won my trust that there aren't ulterior motives behind the decisions, just strongly held opinions/assumptions/visions that are different than my own.
I don't know how to share that with the world, other than to show up here and talk to people when I have something to say :-)
Does this actually allow someone to have a nickname as their only name displayed? It seems like it will only let you show it alongside your real name anyway...
And that would make Google+ even more bizarre. How does a policy change need to be rolled out over time? If you need to tell the review staff, why don't you tell them ahead of time?
I have no idea. I'm not involved in the process of rolling this out so I don't have first hand knowledge of what's involved. Rolling out something globally to many millions of people is usually more complex than it seems from the outside :-)
The linked article seems to mis-understand the new policy. Please read Yonatan's comments on the OP, or refer to the conversation that is happening on Yonatan's own post (https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/YJbz...). I have a lot of respect for Violet Blue, but I'd say that Yonatan is much more of an authority on the new policy than Violet.
You didn't include in your post any context about the rejection - when you changed you name, what you tried to change it to, why you think it meets the need policy, etc.
If you think you have a legitimate false positive, I can assure that Yonatan would be very interested in hearing the details and I would be willing to bet that if you asked a question on his post you would get a response.
It's because Google+ was an attempt to appeal to the masses, not be a hackers cove. The benefit of real names is that people who know you offline can easily find you. They already know you by your given name and, because of Facebook and MySpace, they expect that to continue online. The products you can offer to people who know each other outside of the net differ vastly from the ones you can offer to people spread out among the country/world (With examples ranging from event planners to geo-tagging and facial recognition).
The subgroup of people who prefer pseudo-names is relatively small compared to the larger population. It seemed pretty clear that they'd become more lax after attracting enough users who didn't mind using their given names. I am surprised that they added another field for it, though. I figured they'd just stop enforcing the policy.
I use social networking in two countries, Taiwan and Germany, and less than half of my contacts use their "passport name" on FB. Almost none of my contacts are hackers.
In fact, only the hackers I know use their real names online because they're freelancers and build a presence. I wonder if that leads to the assumption among hackers that only weirdos would ever need this feature. Stating that only n% of n% of n% would ever need privacy actually sounds even more insulting than just calling us "weirdos".
apart from facebook (which cleverly leveraged existing relationships to create a culture where 'real' names were expected) virtually every single internet community is comprised of people operating under pseudonyms. i'd say the subgroup of people who prefer pseudo-names is the larger population.
Facebook is the model they had in mind when building Google+. The default circles were “Friends”, “Family”, “Acquaintances”, “Following”. The main method of recommendation was through your most contacted gmail contacts, a private form of communication. Discovery isn't structured like a forum, sorted by topics of interest. Instead, posts are limited in scope by circles, and organized by poster. (There is the stream, but that's built from people you've personally added)
They wanted a product that took your social life online. To that end, they tried to attract those kinds of people. The majority of sites with pseudonyms are open forums or comment boards. Most of the people you meet there you've never met offline. You can't offer people like that photo-tagging software or groups to set up real-life meets.
To chadmalik and gurkendoktor: Both of you are right. There are justifications for concern over privacy and I think Google went too far in enforcing its policy.
I find this whole thing frustrating, why can I still not get my name to be "Paul (sabret00the)". I write in the first name box Paul in the nickname box sabret00the and then I can't remove the holding letter I applied previously. I then try and simply remove the W and I'm told I need to have my full name up. Why can't I just have Paul and in brackets sabret00the?
How many Google execs that are formulating and implementing these policies spent their formative years on irc, usenet or on web boards being "ultim8haxor" or "l33tGOD"?
This is akin to Metallica's BS move regarding tapers after gaining their position because of tapers. You can't ever really trust people that forget where they come from.
And for example, in case the name represents an online identity, you have to have a "meaningful following" -- basically, there can be only one +Madonna, except these aren't random/made-up user handles, such as on Twitter.
Also, most importantly, Google+ still bans anonymity.
UPDATE 2: I was partly mistaken in my conclusions. See comments by @ElbertF below.
[1] http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/eff-declares-premature-victo...