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

[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.