Why Facebook gets away with demanding "Real Names" and Google doesn't

[andrewducker]

If I go to join Facebook then I know, at the moment that I sign up, that it requires my real name. And all that that affects is my Facebook account.

If I go to join Google+ then I am almost certainly doing so with an existing Google Account - and that account may well already be full of things that I do not want to be connected to my public identity.

The two use conditions may well have looked similar from inside Google, but they are most definitely being felt differently outside of the company.

And that's why Facebook gets very little in the way of complaining about their (nigh-identical) policy, and Google are taking a lot of flak over it.

I really do think that unless they back down on this it's going to be the death of the system.

Comments

[birguslatro]

Yeah, it's wrong on a lot of fronts, since FaceBook don't also run one of the top online email services and the top search engine.

I doubt they care about matching FB's numbers though, as I'm sure they're much more interested in just building a big online authentication service. G+ is about the names, not the social service.

[brewsternorth]

Yup. I was just reading an article - curiously enough, on G+ - about exactly this. You probably read the same one including Skud's insightful comments.

Interestingly enough, someone posted this link to the #nymwars hashtag on Twitter, suggesting alternatives to various Google services. (And Dreamwidth rates a mention, heh.)

[matgb]

Addenda: Facebook only really enforces the policy if someone is reported to them. At least 5 people on my FB friends are using a false name on the site and have been for years. Some of them are bloody obviously fake as well.

Google is actively seeking out those using names they disapprove of. so they've gone a long way further than FB, who only really care if a fake name is used abusively or obnoxiously.

Most accounts that get shut down on FB are for using it incorrectly-you can convert a personal account into a page, for example, and pages should be used for products, events &c. That's actually a policy I approve of. Although "Leeds Liberal Democrats" still exists as a personal account, I'm amased no one has reported that to them yet given current politics.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

G+ is starting to resemble a graveyard anyway. I haven't seen statistics, but I'd say useage is dropping off significantly now.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, they got it started, it got a mass of people, and then they basically completely failed to push it.

It doesn't need to die - all they need to do is make it more open than Facebook, and make it easy to get your stuff on there, in the form you want, open to whoever you want.

Basically, Livejournal, but run by Google, and tied in to all their other stuff.

But sadly, they don't really seem to be getting that done.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Most people seem to have slunk back to facebook, just because that's where the user mass is.

I still don't know what to do with my G+, it seems too impersonal for my usual quite personal 'this is my life' blogging. And, there's already a million people using it to share links, so I don't really feel the need to just share interesting links.

Which sort of makes me wonder if the whole social media boom is going to turn out to be a balloon which is about to burst. And blogging will go back to being a niche sort of thing again.

[fearmeforiampink]

Mmmm. I just keep on not getting around to following it — I'm already keeping up with Livejournal and vaguely with Facebook and Twitter, so adding another thing to that is problematic.

That, and I've never been that good at the 'regular comment on life' element of blogging. I find reading other peoples semi-lifelogs interesting for the most part, but I don't write in that way myself.

In theory, all the new people that I don't keep up with through other media should keep me interested in Google+. In practice, they haven't.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's definitely an issue for me too. I keep up to date with LJ. I sort of drop into twitter and FB. And having yet another place to check is just overload.

[andrewducker]

I happily dropped Twitter in favour of it.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yeah, now you mention it, I haven't actually logged into Twitter all week long.

[steer.livejournal.com]

It's already significantly more open than facebook. However, it takes a lot of traction to get a social network going and people tend to stick with where the traffic is. Hence we're seeing the same thing we saw with buzz... big launch... initial enthusiasm... sudden die away.

For me it's not about the technology and the name things is a distraction (I know a lot of geeks and the number who care is low). It's simply that people want to post things on the social network where the most people they care about will see it. It's a damn hard thing to move that.

[firecat]

The other reason is that FB doesn't enforce the real names policy for the most part, and G+ has been doing so rather intensively.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. Google have also been enforcing it heavy-handedly and cack-fistedly, if that's not too mangled a metaphor.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I'm worried that g+ merges in google calendar as I wouldn't want all my friends in circles seeing that.funnily enough I think you're the only friend I have that has access to my google calendar.

[andrewducker]

It's not going to share anything with people you haven't given access to. That's one thing it's been doing right.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Google Calendar already has its own secure sharing settings; they wouldn't override those just for G+.

Although if you've already got things publicly visible on Google Calendar that you wouldn't want public... it might call attention to this fact so that you notice and fix it ;)

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think they're right to stick to the real names but it won't catch on anyway.

In any case, you can always have a second google account for google plus -- that's what I did.

[andrewducker]

Switching back and forth between accounts is a right pain though.

[steer.livejournal.com]

It's not that bad if you use the multiple account sign in thingy but it's not perfect. I do it all the time and use multiple google products regularly.

The one annoyance is that if one account is signed to a non-gmail account the gmail page won't switch accounts and sticks on the login page. Other than that it's a very minor annoyance.

[andrewducker]

It's still annoyance - and that problem is exactly the one I have, as my main account is on Google Apps.

I've solved it temporarily by having Google+ in Chrome.

But most people aren't going to be arsed switching back and forth between Google logins, they're just going to say "fuck it".

[steer.livejournal.com]

But most people aren't going to be arsed switching back and forth between Google logins

Most people are going to use their real name for all accounts anyway. However, most people with this problem I'd have thought would switch back and forth as, like I say, it's a really minor problem for most things. The problem will disappear more as google+ fades from use.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced it's going to survive anyway, which is a shame but there you go. Apart from anything else they've been way too slow with calendar integration.

I think there's another dimension in that the type of people who're on Google+ right now, the early adopters, are more likely to be the types who have big anonymous identities online already that they'd like to keep maintaining, and a following who know them by that identity. Whereas Facebook started with university students and was part of their university identity, which was already open to other students in large part. They were a group who were happy to identify by their real names to other students. The difference in the type of early adopters for the respective systems is, to my mind, more likely to be a reason for the consternation than the already-existing-profile thing. Particularly given that looking at my contacts list, most of the folk I have on there with gmail accounts not related to online gaming somehow already have an address that's some variation on firstnamelastname@gmail.com.

[naath.livejournal.com]

FB asks you for your real name, and it's clear that "real name" is the community norm on FB - but they don't actually enforce it much.

Also G+ is enforcing it wrong; they have no fucking idea what a "real name" might look like, and so FAIL.