Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+ 238
An anonymous reader writes When Google+ launched, it received criticism across the internet for requiring that users register with their real names. Now, Google has finally relented and removed all restrictions on what usernames people are allowed to use. The company said, "We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be."
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In other words (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes. We are making this PR-friendly change because we don't need you to be logged-in in order to track you.
Bullshit + News = Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
- The news Story = " removed all restrictions on what usernames people are allowed to use"
- So i clicked "Edit your name:"
- I enter "4D", in the name field
Result = "Please fill in the name fields."
Garbage news for a garbage product. Did any of the devs even think to "test it"?
..unnecessarily difficult experiences for some.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes,
Unnecessarily difficult, because google either already knows who you are (via some other registered service(s) i.e. Adwords etc) or will link in a relationship to your choosen "Pseudonym" to your real name, web history and other online events later on anyway.
So yeah google, what a stupid idea.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort off. what they do is send links asking if you know certain people and give the names. They also have a link for if they misidentified them.
So some sorry sap will help them check your drivers license. It's probably someone who you worked with 10 years ago or who has seen you at a pub or something too. I get these all the time for random people in my area. I tend to shorten my name when signing up for crap and they ended up with my full name and I bet it was this exactly. I know the people they ask me if I know- they are geo-locating your ip or something to pass them around.
Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous (Score:3, Interesting)
Restore the glory of the Internet? You mean to go back to a time when most people posted on Usenet with their real name and email address as their signature? The time when even political discussions were civilized?
From my point of view, anonymity was the worst thing that happened to the Internet.
Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases. (Score:5, Interesting)
The same happened with my hometown paper but the reverse is true. They went from a moderated (meaning the spam and abusive posts were never posted since posts had to be pre-approved) with lots of insightful comments to almost no comments what-so-ever and the few that were commenting were doing so from fake FB accounts. So the noise ratio went way up on the comments they were getting. In short, they replaced their working moderation system with the FB system thinking the same way you do and got exactly the opposite effect.
Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you know whether those were their "real name"? I knew a guy who once got interviewed for a newspaper, and they reported his name exactly as written; Tsu Dho Nimh.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:4, Interesting)
Too Little, Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
Google+ was trying to be a social network, and one of Google's execs (I think Eric?) also described it as an "identity service", which is something advertisers may want but slightly fewer than zero readers and writers actually wanted. No Facebook kill here, even if it does stick around longer than Orkut (which mainly took off because John Perry Barlow gave a bunch of invites to friends in Brazil, and Brazilians thought it was a great service for gossip.)
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
I made a JavaScript script that auto-clicks the "Show more comments" button every second, and I would leave it for a while. It can easily uncover 2000-3000 comments. It makes Chrome use up all the RAM though, I can't believe how much RAM you need to display a few thousand lines of text.