Cory Doctorow had an interesting piece in The Guardian this week about Google + and more to the point Eric Scmidt’s comments that nobody is forcing people to use Google +. This came on the back of Eric Schmidt’s comments to NPR’s Andy Carvin in Edinburgh. This was the same piece that led to claims that Google + is primarily an identity service, although Tateru Nino commenting on Hamlet Au’s blog post on social networks suggested it’s Google profiles that will be the identity service.
Cory’s post is largely about discussing the real name policy of Google + and why Eric Schmidt’s comment is off, I don’t entirely agree there, I’m someone who won’t use Google + because of their policy but there is an underlying function creep with these real name policies that could very well spread, I remain opposed to such policies for many reasons, one certainly being that in some ways they are anti social, you don’t need to know your friend’s real name on a social network because if that friend wants to interact with you, they will tell you their name, that’s often how friendships are forged, you meet, you say hello, you get to know each other, you get to know more about each other, this is normal human interaction. I’ve mentioned this before but in the days before Real_ID on World Of Warcraft the guys I play WoW with would share avatar and server names and then we’d all get into a guild together, that’s how friends work.
The arguments in favour of real name only social networking are flimsy to say the least, yet they come up all the time in these sort of threads. Why wouldn’t you want your name associated with a comment? What are you hiding? If you don’t want to be known don’t go on The Internet. All people who don’t use real names are just anonymous trolls, it’s tiresome reading the same flimsy reasons over and over.
Continue reading “Real Name Policy Function Creep Needs To Be Halted”