Google+ tinkers with their name policy

[firecat]

Emphasis on "tinkers"—they've made a change to their interface so you can display a third name (a "nickname") alongside your first-and-last-name, but you can't display the nickname by itself, so you can't be pseudonymous.

There's a long discussion of it here.

There are a number of comments by the author of the original post, Yonatan Zunger, a chief architect at Google, that make me bang my head on the desk repeatedly. I can't figure out a way to link to the comments directly, but here's one that particularly caused head-banging:

We thought this was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently when they were and weren't going by their real names. After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case. (And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.

DUH!!!

Comments

[ailbhe]

I think the trickle-up effect - the massed brains at Google (who are not idiots) sending clue up to the elite powerful few who haven't been among the common herd for so long they have no idea what's what - will eventually happen. But it hasn't yet, and Rob can't tell me a lot of what happens internally; I just know he's not the only one with Issues around the names thing.

[firecat]

I guess I didn't think of Google as having such clueless leaders; I am too hopeful sometimes.