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Google+ To End Real Names Policy
bs0d3 writes "After months of Google+ being unsuccessful at taking the edge over Facebook, Google announces a new plan. Google executive Vic Gundotra announced yesterday that they will be 'adding features that will "support other forms of identity,"' a major victory for security and privacy advocates. If Google+ gets rid of their 'real names' policy, they will finally be the social networking site that people will flock to when running away from Facebook."
JWZ is a skeptic; he describes as "premature victory" (and much harsher things, too) any rejoicing in the announced policy change, writing in part "My guess? I'll bet they still require you to register with your 'real' name, but then they'll graciously allow you to have a linked nickname or two, meaning they're still fully prepared to roll over on you to authoritarian governments or advertisers at the drop of a hat."
I mean, seeing as he doesn't need it any more...
They understand the problem. But it might be too little too late.
If they really want more users then they should add profile support to Google Apps so the metric crap-ton of people who ALREADY PAY THEM MONEY can use Google+.
Ho hum... whatever.
I don't mind that they'll cough up my "real" name so much. Just as long as it isn't available to casual browsing.
Communication should be open and federated, yet private and protected by strong cryptography.
Communication is a human right.
Social networking needs to be seen as something other than an "app" or a trendy buzzword. Why can't we call it communication? Why can't we standardize a protocol for more robust communication than is offered by email?
Under proprietary services, you'll never be anything more than an identified consumer (even by pseudonym) on the corporate feedlot, for sale to advertisers.
There will always be a primary key, even if it isn't the same one issued to you by the government (legal name). This is Google - they'll hoover up your phone number, email, address, from you and your contacts, and identify you anyway. Don't kid yourselves. Unless you're a hardcore privacy geek, your friends will leak info, even if you don't. Google is letting you use a pseudonym because they know their datamining is so powerful that they can identify you anyway.
I don't mind sharing my life, but I'm not going to share it with an advertising conglomerate and any marketroid willing to cough up the required price.
The things people share on proprietary networks are shared with more unknown third party marketers than with their real, actual friends and family.
Stop filling out your own marketing profiles. Revolt. You are a human being, not a datapoint.
Not sure what the big deal is, my G+ account name is a false name; not even a semblance of a real name in fact. Of course, I'm sure google has my real name in their system somewhere, and I'm sure it's tied to this G+ account in some way shape or form.
Diaspora would be cool and all, you know, if it would ever launch. I swear I signed up for that site like 2 years ago, and all I ever get are emails wanting me to donate.
People can't report you for it if they can't see it.
They already squandered the publicity and marketing that existed around the launch. In the process, they pissed off many users and made even more suspicious. There is no chance to recover after the major blunders they have made. Google+ is dead now, just like wave, and Google will admit it eventually. The best thing they can do is try to contain that failure so it doesn't spill over into their other, successful services, especially Gmail.
Great Intellect...
Until I've seen how the policy is written (and enforced), I have to proceed with caution and assume this is just another trick they've copied from Facebook (i.e. the trick where they announce theoretically improved privacy to the public, but maintain the status quo in practice (and in the fine print)).
I got the invite, and made an account, but the site is pretty buggy so its a hassle. Besides, theres even fewer of my friends on Diaspora than on G+
I spent five minutes stealing cool sigs and all I got was this.
How long is the typical wait for an invite on joindiaspora.com?
Maybe I got this wrong but:
a) Google+ were just rolled out from invite only beta
b) Google adds stuff to G+ almost every week
c) Goole+ for App users are just about to launch
d) Company accounts are yet to be announced
And we already decided that it was unsuccessful?
And ohh, by the way, I love real name policy. And don't get me started, if you want to be really anonymous, you can create innocent looking fake name and surename and other details.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I understand some people's hangups with using their real names, but what I don't understand is why they're complaining so loudly.
It's Google's site, and it's their prerogative to implement whatever rules fit their fancy. It's not like people are being forced to join, so if you don't like the rules, join a social network which allows you to use nicknames.
In fact, there's one which does just that: MySpace.
Here's the founder's comments on the whole real name thing: https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/EcJ77v4KRSA
Or you could just create your own social network, with blackjack, and hookers.
In fact, forget the social network.
I hear what you are saying, but I have Cardinal Richelieu on the other line and he says "LOL"
Good-bye
At least 20% of the people in my circles have faux names, especially in the brony circle (yeah, yeah, I do have brony friends). I don't think Google really gives a shit.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
" And we already decided that it was unsuccessful?"
Did you miss the link to the story about the 60% drop on active users that was posted 10 days ago? That is probably why they made that statement.
It's not just that the policy was wrong (it is); it's that the way it was enforced was error-prone. If you happen to have a weird name (like Violet Blue) then the enforcement mechanisms would assume that you were using a pseudonym and ask you to provide a "real" name. There was never any mechanism to convince Google that the weird name was, in fact, your real name.
I think we are right to be concerned that the next policy and set of enforcement mechanisms will be just as silly, stupid and wrong as the present one is.
Finding God in a Dog
How many users are on facebook with their real names? The problem was not that they wouldn't let people use faux names but that they waited when they should have pounded. When facebook was issues with their chat software and google+ didn't push for people to join. I have never been to google+ and i don't see a need to go to it. All of my friends (wife) use facebook, why go?
I'm actually pretty baffled that people are still pissed about this "real name policy." Even more confused that people think this is really the reason people aren't flocking from Facebook to Google+.
I might use Google+ if it offered me something Facebook didn't, full stop.
As it stands, why switch? That's sort of like saying, "Why don't you change phone numbers? The 241 prefix is so much better than the 547 prefix you have now."
If all my friends were on Google+, I might use Google+ more than I use Facebook. They're not. In fact, the ones who have Google+ accounts don't do anything there. So there's not much reason for me to waste any time on it, either. I don't know what makes this so hard to understand. It kind of feels like Google is ashamed to admit it's not offering anything compelling with Google+. In this scenario, Facebook is Google and Google+ is Bing, it's just that simple.
Breakfast served all day!
Diaspora is decentralized, so you may join any pod (server) and befriend and interact with anyone on other pods.
Only the pod run by the founders (joindiaspora.org) is currently invite only. You may join any of the other open pods out there without an invite.
Check podupti.me for a larger list, or Diasp.org (which is one of my personal favorites).
Diasporafoundation.org has more information on the project in general.
Yeah, those was very trustworthy statistics and really reliable trend :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
This will be a big boost to "purchaseplusone.com", "googleplus1supply.com", "buyrealplusone.com" (a Google advertiser, no less) and "plusonehero.com", "buyplusoneservice.com", "buygoogleplus1.net", "buyplusonenow.com", and "plusonesbuilder.com". It will be even easier for them to acquire Google accounts and create "+1" value for their customers.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social. As soon as a social service provides a boost to search ranking, it gets spammed. Heavily. This has happened to Google Places., Yelp, Citysearch (really bad there), Twitter (this is why your Twitter feeds are full of spam links), Facebook "likes", and now Google +1. From a spammer perspective, social spamming is easy and cheap. Setting up a link farm requires web sites, unique content, and ongoing site maintenance. Social spam just requires phony free accounts. The social services host your spam for you, for free.
Presumably the smart people at Google have figured this out by now, but they've been told that 2011 employee bonuses depends on Google's success at social. So, from a Google employee perspective, sacrificing search quality for social features makes sense. Google top management got paranoid about Facebook, which is about 1/5 the size of Google and peaked a few months back. (Social networks grow and die like nightclubs, which have a limited lifetime of coolness. Remember AOL, Geocities, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Myspace...)
Google search quality efforts are mostly "window dressing", as the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island put it in his statement about Google's non-prosecution agreement. When ad revenue conflicts with search quality, ad revenue wins. Prof. Ben Eidelman of the Harvard Business School has analyzed this in detail.
I never really got what this was such a big deal to people. It's distracting from the fact that the site still lacks basic features, like be able to change the visibility of a post, nesting circles, chat invite though button (instead of having to know the other's e-mail), being able to select multiple circles in your stream (instead of all or 1 -- god this is so fucking obvious) and most of all ... org/group/business pages.
Without org pages, I have no way of drawing new people in since all of my social networking usually revolves around a page or a group. Google even acknowledged that it was a mistake not to be ready with them but they still haven't taken a break from surfing in the parking lot long enough to implement them.
I really wanted G+ to succeed, but there's obviously something very wrong with the management over there. I thought they were going all in with this product, but we only see a minor update every couple of weeks, and now the momentum is gone. I wonder who will get promoted for this fuck up.
Its easy. Stop trying to be Facebook. There are too many sites now that are just photocopying Facebook. People want something different, that is what drives competition.
And what about those of us who already had our G+ accounts deleted for refusing to use our real names?
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
If they're serious about this, all they have to do is adopt OpenID and not be dicks about it. Maybe things have changed, but last I checked big companies like Google and Facebook only accept OpenID from either themselves or other big companies. This insular, corporate attitude contrasts with the friendly Internet face they like to portray.
That's not a rebuttal, that's just an ad hominem.
Diaspora was a great concept, and an abysmally failed execution. They managed to simultaneously launch to fast and too slow. They failed to launch (or at least publicly advertise or even point out the pods that were available) anywhere near the time they had hype or interest (dropping them from the radar for anyone but the extreme tinfoilhats and hardcore geeks), Then when they did finally show what they had, it was so buggy, security hole filled and flawed, that the tinfoil hats and 3/4ths of the geeks who were interested ran away. Say what you will about G+, but they actually do have at least a niche that uses and likes their product. I haven't really heard of anyone using diaspora as more then a slight curiosity.
"JWZ is a skeptic" wrong, wrong, wrong, the word you want here is "realist".
So, JWZ is a realist.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
60% drop in public posts I believe. At a service that's selling point was that most posts don't have to be public and you can send them specifically to the groups you want them to go to. I would be far from surprised if most of face-books "increasing activity" turned out to be 80% "Take care of this dying cow for me" farm ville posts. I can say I have about half the number of friends on G+ that I had on facebook, yet there are twice as many posts with actual interesting information then I ever saw on facebook.
>"I'll bet they still require you to register with your 'real' name, but then they'll graciously allow you to have a linked nickname or two, meaning they're still fully prepared to roll over on you to authoritarian governments or advertisers at the drop of a hat."
And even if they didn't, it still wouldn't matter. Google can and would likely use its massive infrastructure to track down who each "unnamed" user is and place an identity on each "in the background". It has been proven over and over again that it can be done. Photo recognition, IP addresses, browser cookies, access behavior, linked accounts, phone numbers, etc, etc, etc. With enough CPU power and data (both of which Google has) it won't take them long to correctly identify many such pseudo-anonymous users.
Still, it is a huge victory if they would at least let people use screen names.
While I advocate for the benefits of real name identification, I do understand that some people live in regimes where speaking out results in a bullet to the head.
I'm glad Google+ has decided to embrace those potential users.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Cardinal Richelieu
I didn't expect that sort of comparison
So it's true!
Why does G+ have to take "the edge over Facebook"? Computers may be binary, people, at least people who get out of their basements, are not.
G+ has many better features for sharing with granular control. Better long-form posting; FB has expanded it some but not unlimited like G+. Sure, I wish they had nested circles and boolean logic for circles, but it's not all so hard. It's still easier and more discoverable to control sharing on G+ than it is on FB, even with FB's recent massive improvements in this realm (an obvious panic-response to G+ on the same order as IE7 was to FF). G+ is inherently asymmetrical, while FB's "subscribe" asymmetry is another tacked-on panic response to G+.
G+ is where I interact with people I hadn't necessarily known before, on topics of shared interest, as well as in longer-form with people I do know. Facebook, which I nuked and then created a new, no-prior-history account, is where I interact with people I know, on actual "Social" things.
Facebook is the "Family Room". Google+ is the "Discussion Salon and Art Gallery".
As to no business/org pages at launch: It's not a bug, it's a feature, and thanks be to [$DEITY] for it. We've had 4 months of G+ without all the commercialism so that it could grow organically as shaped by its adopters. Advertisers, commercial businesses, celebrity fan sites, are now coming into an established community with existing norms, rather than making it a commercial hotspot. Celebs who wanted to interact as real people, not as celebs, are there as real people. Like Jeri Ryan, who is not only in my Circles but she put me in hers. Other than some rare comments about the latest ep of her current TV series, she posts about the same types of things non-celebs do, and interacts with her circles.
This "Google+ has failed" meme is stupid spin by people who only think linearly. They probably believe that politics only has a "left" and a "right" dimension too.
The Slashdot crowd, much like "the media", is eager to predict the future based on a inconclusive data. THAT is why "we" have decided Google+ was unsuccessful.
Similar analysis resulted in predictions of the death of Apple and the dominance of AMD in the processor market.
The first that comes to mind is that they require a new password each time. Since people usually have about 15 passwords and recycle them they'll eventually have all of your passwords.
Google, you need to start an Internal Affairs department... get the EFF to send you some people. Let them keep tract of subpoenas, data stored internally, anonymity aspects, encouraging developers to implement security procedures, etc.
If you get really crazy privacy advocates, it won't upset your corporate culture. Hire men in suits and it will.
most people don't care and freely use their real name on facebook
Most people aren't early adopters, however often nerds are.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Alternative identities will have people flocking to Google+? Bullshit.
Letting people play Farmville, The Sims Social, and Family Feud would be way more effective. And let me keep my same farm as on Farmville. (And by "my" I really "their" since Farmville has always seemed pretty stupid to me. But hey, whatever app blows your hair back needs to work seemlessly.)
----- obSig
You might not get modded into oblivion if you would learn how to tell the difference between one man's opinion and consensus, or could distinguish between imperfection and failure, or understood why the linked "usage down 60%" story is based on unreliable information.
Google Plus is exceeding expectations of both its creators and its user base, despite what a small collection of very vocal paranoid privacy nuts would have you think. Where they get the idea that an unencrypted social network hosted by a private company you're not even paying is a smart place to conduct a revolution escapes me.
I'd just like to add 2 small questions to distinguish the problem from what is going on.
1 - What was the point in getting real names?
Dummy answer: perform a mapping between online identity (let us say "email") and real word identity (table column "person id").
Why? Your imagination is the limit. But don't be evil.
2 - Now that enough people registered with a real name, got their emails, their contacts, their phone number, their address, and many others, if somebody who did not gave his/her real name shows up, isn't there many ways to recover it using information a) about people he/she interacts with; and b) that other people already gave about this guy?
Researchers are working on it.
And don't tell me about separate identities if you use the same computer, or the same browser, or the same password for them. Linking them is easy, eff.org has many insightful papers about it. As long as you ARE a single person, assigning a "real-life" name to your online identity is just a big graph-solving problem, which was greatly simplified by the people you know and communicate with, as many variables are now bound thank to them.
This is what's great with those social networks: if you do not tell us who you are, it doesn't matter, somebody else will.
no... Google+ has the same privacy model as Facebook: "Give us your real name so we can sell it to third parties, and of course use it ourselves, and link you to external databases, and hand your butt to your government (and possibly other governments as well.)"
The only real difference is that Facebook hasn't been very diligent in enforcing the real name policy, while Google+ came screaming out of the gate, deleting people's accounts left and right.
Go read the terms of service for the two social networks; they aren't really that different.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Google Plus is exceeding expectations of both its creators and its user base
That's some potent marketspeak you're astroturfing there.
You can't take the sky from me...
So they ask you for your real name. Good fucking god people! Can anyone think of other examples of this?
Why on earth are we all suddenly obliged to actually give a real name when we never have before?
Get the fuck over it! Put in Joe Bloggs, just like you did when you registered for MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, eBay, CodeProject...
and just STFU! No more stories about this FFS!
In any case, you also have the option to host your own Diaspora website.
I tried doing this on a Fedora 14 machine and the docs were all wrong and nothing worked right. I got stuck in gem hell. You know why Disaspora* has failed? Rails.
It would have been done last year if it were written in PHP or Perl. There, I've said it. I hate PHP, but Rails is worse, unless you're a full-time Rails shop. Ruby doesn't make up for Rails, and Ruby's VM has historically sucked (it seems to be OK now as long as you run it under Java).
Rails might be fine for the developers, but the point of Disapora* is that it's decentralized. If it's a pain in the ass for a sysadmin to deploy, it's a complete failure. If I can't 'yum install disapora-server' at some point, the network effect will never happen.
I now prepare for the onslaught of downmods from guys with thick-rimmed glasses who somehow figured out how to read Slashdot in TextMate on their MacBook Pros.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And I have a question....
How the /fuck/ do they verify that your nom is your legal name? Eh? They didn't ask me for any ID or anything else.
So as far as anyone is concerned on either network, I am an Eurasian Eagle Owl, of the Siberian subspecies.
Farcebook wouldn't take Boyle M. Owl, my "normal" alias, but it took that.
They only go after the "offensively fake" or "names with non-ascii characters" (woe be unto you if you have a name from another language) or "names too close to celebrities," which the last actually nails some actual celebrities.
It's bullshit policy that is impossible to enforce fairly because they set it up wrong.
Fuck the war on anonymity. I'm keeping my aliases, thanks.
--
BMO
Facebook kept sending me informational emails about posts on my wall, so I reset the pw and took control of the account. Have I ever provided any information to facebook? Hell No and I have absolutely no intention of doing so. Say what you will but at least the pw reset for facebook did work though I doubth the expected it to be used in the manner I did but what the hell. They're lucky I didn't pursue the issue on the CanSpam Act of my state at a cost of $2500 per incident though thinking about it, I should shoot myself for failing to take full advantage of the law and screwing Facebook for spamming my gmail account.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Yeah, it does look like it. Regardless, it's accurate.
Feel free to try to prove the statement wrong. Show some analyst projections where higher adoption rates were expected, or present some reports where user sentiment is negative overall.
Google Plus users have plenty of evidence suggesting you won't find either. And we don't about all you cynical bastards hanging out here making silly accusations.
People prosecuted for their political opinions.
People under attack by stalkers and abusive partners.
People with opinions that go against their society's norms and could be ostracised or worse.
Gays.
Whistleblowers.
And so on and so forth. Advocates for all these and other groups, often not technically inclined, have warned about the dangers of opening yourself to everybody and his dog on the net.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is so often repeated that is getting boring.
So CNN business is not news broadcasting it is advertising.
Or football teams that rename their stadiums and put advertisements on their kits are not in the sports business, but in advertising.
Cappice?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If I go by "Joe", my identity is Joe regardless of what my "real" identity is. So before any security or policy or correctness argument, the enforcement of "real" names resulted in a "broken identity" platform more than anything else. And now, by allowing "any" identity, all they are doing is satisfying the first prerequisite for "real" identity. Identity is sustained by utility, not by legal records.
There are plenty of examples out there of places both on and offline where you can make friends, socialize and share experiences without inviting all the frigging world to the party.
As for anonymity, any old internet hat would tell you that communities can be created behind pseudonyms (gosh, had people already forgotten the Half Life craze?)
People for whom Facebook has been a feature of growing up have, mistakenly, assumed that it is OK to put your life in public for all to see, and most importantly, for anybody to find about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Really, it is all there in the history books.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your anecdote against mine: I have several (5-6) friends who told me they're sick of FB and the constant uncontrolled spam there, and are abandoning their accounts in favour of G+. 2-3 of those friends are people who quite surprised me with this decision, as I considered them to be your average facebook fodder.
its buggy as hell.
they let me test one of the prototypes. i hit enter without entring anything and got a fucking backtrace? WTF? Doesn't ruby on rails have a nice forms-framework as django? not catching user-input errors but dropping the user into a backtrace? WTF?
Did you miss the link to the story about the 60% drop on active users that was posted 10 days ago?
Nope. But you apparently you failed to follow the link.
Ask yourself: How in the world would a dodgy little Indian SEO consultancy have access to Google's numbers.
Answer: They wouldn't. The article was a complete fabrication, and Facebook has already been called out for planting such PR fabrications.
Wake up, tool.
The 'privacy nerd circle'.... do you realize how ignorant you look?
That you have no idea why privacy is important -- and ESSENTIAL to liberty and freedom, only shows people how ill-educated, and uninformed, the average 'facebook'-nerd or social-site-nerd is. And you'll wonder why you have problems finding a job...
*shakes head*...
Test.
No one has enough mod points. Seriously, lower the bar to entry or introduce disqus-like +1 moderation
I'm waiting for the YouTube mail in my gmail account saying "other people also watched this shizzle" based upon the videos I watched because I forgot to logoff from gmail when watching a YT video.
I'm quite done with user tracking.
Privacy is terrorism.