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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.