Rich Fiscus
20 Oct 2011 3:33
Google Senior Vice-President of Social Business Vic Gundotra told an interviewer at the Web 2.0 Summit that support for pseudonyms in Google+ is coming at some point in the future.
In July, at about the same time Google+ reached 20 million users, the company began suspending accounts where people weren't using their real names as Google+ user IDs.
They defended this by pointing out their terms of service specifically require users to go by their real names:
To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.
It was largely an issue of development priorities. It's complicated to get this right. It's complicated on multiple dimensions. One of the dimensions it's complicated on is atmosphere. You know if you're a woman and you post a photo and Captain Crunch or Dogfart comments on it, it changes the atmosphere of the product. And so we wanted the product to be a product where you could discover people you know. And they're not called Captain Crunch. They're called Lisa Adams, and that's how you discover the people that you know.
That doesn't mean that we're not going to support other forms of identity. It's coming. It's just that this is the way we wanted to roll out the service. This is the atmosphere we wanted to set and as we are out more than a month - we've been out in beta - open for about a month, we'll add these features.