The Google + issues rumble on for those with pseudonyms, there have been some interesting blog posts (and comments) from Prok, Marx Dudek and Hamlet Au. Marx Dudek’s post is interesting regarding verifying their account to google by using a mobile phone, when Marx hadn’t supplied them with a mobile phone number. I didn’t have to provide a mobile phone number when I signed up for Gmail either.
Prok and Hamlet both have links to a google plus discussion, with Prok linking to a post by Andrew Bunner, a google engineer, calling for people to report fake profiles. Whatever the intent of Andrew’s post was, the reality is that it will have meant people reporting avatar profiles, the intent may well have been to report business profiles, but that doesn’t seem to have been how the post was received.
Hamlet’s post links to the same post by Andrew Bunner but suggests he’s saying if your name doesn’t look fake, you’re hardly likely to be flagged. Andrew Bunner is an engineer, not a policy maker, so that may explain some of the confusion but the bigger confusion really comes from Google’s odd attitude. This really goes back to February when Alma Whitten, director of privacy posted a blog post under the title: The Freedom To Be Who You Want To Be …. this is where their stance on Google Plus and real names really gets confusing.
The blog post identifies three modes for using google services, unidentified, pseudonymous and identified. Now all seems well at this point, Google clearly differentiate beween pseudonymous and anonymous here, something that unfortunately seems to have escaped some commenters. However as Google + is described as a real life sharing network, they suggest you should use your real name or the name you are commonly known as and this is where both Google + and Facebook now that it has grown so large, are deluding themselves, to be fair to Facebook, when they started it was used as a network for people who pretty much knew each other in real life, however that’s not the case today and for Google + to be starting from such a premise, well that’s just absurd.
Let’s take one example, William Shatner had his Google + account suspended , as reported by The Register, after saying hello, admittedly Google didn’t know it was the real William Shatner so suspending the account was fair enough and they have reinstated it, as you can see here. How many of the people in William Shatner’s circles does William Shatner know in real life? How many of the people who have William Shatner in their circles, know William Shatner in real life? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this because that’s the way online interactions go, but it does go some way to showing why the anti pseudonym stance from Google is the wrong starting point for the Google Plus project.
Facebook, as I mentioned started from a different premise, but today, that premise is a bit of a false position too. Facebook comments show this, if you comment on a site that utilises Facebook comments you are largely interacting with people whom you don’t know in real life, indeed if you started to add these people from your Facebook comments to your Facebook friends, then you’re not using Facebook as intended and really, this is why Facebook should consider dropping their anti pseudonym stance too, because Facebook has morphed into something bigger than people’s real life friends.
The issue really is identity and even pseudonyms require a degree of verification when they social network, we saw this with Avatars United when people complained that others were using their names. The result of that was that Linden Lab introduced a procedure to verify your avatar name at Avatars United. I’ve also known people who sign up to other grids just to make sure they register their avatar name, preventing other people from using their avatar identity and this is what makes pseudonyms very different from anonymity.
Google and Facebook are of course free to implement their rules as they best see fit, but by excluding pseudonyms they are missing a share of the market. I do however respect their rules, on Facebook I have a couple of pages, which are allowed, in the case of Google + I simply won’t use it, no big deal and as Tateru Nino pointed out recently, all these disparate social networks are a time sink, it’s the very reason I haven’t done much with my Facebook pages. Logging into Second Life, World Of Warcraft, Twitter, Second Life related forums, blogs, following The Guardian, Aston Villa news and working full time already takes up enough of my time and that’s before we get onto the new Second Life profiles.
The ideal social network for me would be one where I could tie together these disparate social networks, one that allowed me to have a circle for Ciaran Laval and a circle for my real life interactions, although mostly I use the telephone network to arrange meeting people down the pub, be that by phoning people or send text messages. A social network that puts me in control of who I am and whom I post to would be a winner and so far the closest to that I’ve found is Twitter.
Seems to me that it would be rather advantageous to allow people to flag their account as one of the 3 types. That way people would know beforehand. If someone does not want to network with someone who is using a pseudonym then let that be the users choice, Google should not be making that decision for us.
That is a beautiful solution to the whole matter on so many levels, even to potential advertisers who can then decide whether they want to pay to advertise to pseudonyms, identified or even unidentified.
If people identify in one of the three states there’s no real substance to accusations they’re trying to cheat the system.
I’ve received mail at home for “Jezebel Bailey”. Doesn’t that make her “real”? I need to find out if she has a social security number.
Self-flagging your account as one of three states would be cool… except it would mislead people into believing that there was some authority behind what people were calling the “identified state”.
Let’s be clear: unless a Google employee comes to my house, views my ID and compares the photo on it to me, I am not “identified” regardless of what I might claim to the contrary.
Face it, on the web, there’s really only 1. self-identified, 2. pseudonymous, and 3. anonymous, and in a large number of cases 1 and 2 cannot be distinguished.
The only distinction that can be made is between people who are willing to commit a little photoshop fraud and those who aren’t.
Unfortunately, the current system at Google favours the former, while pretending the latter.
I can’t imagine a much less secure environment.
Indeed, this is the flaw with any current online verification system, you don’t actually know who is really at the other side of the monitor and many people have pointed out that Google, like Facebook, cannot really prove the identity of people.
Flags do have plus points, but as you say, they also need to be taken with a pinch of salt when people are claiming to be whom they say they are.
I meant to add that I agree wholeheartedly, though.
If only it weren’t for that dastardly character limit that Twitter imposes, it would be perfect.
A few people have already told me that they’re leaving g+ because of the pseudonymity issues, but I still think it has better prospects than Facebook. I say, let’s dance before we walk…:)
http://plusinclusive.blogspot.com/2011/07/if-we-cant-dance-dont-want-to-be-part.html
If you’re in Boston and you want to help coordinate here, contact me. Elsewhere? Go with it (and be sweet!) and contact me for advice if you like. 40+ years of experience both dance and nonviolent positive actions.
We have rumors today of dances in Boston, Munich, Mountain View, NYC, London, (I think that’s it…). Oh, and Second Life…
Thanks for the link, I’ll keep my eye on the project.