A number of Google+ users woke up this morning to find their much sought after accounts had been removed by the powers that be, this due to their use of pseudonyms on their new public profiles instead of their birth names.
Google are pushing the fact that their social network brings back the personal touch which has become ever absent from our online social experience, but today it’s been revealed that if you’re not willing to adhere to the pretty unreasonable naming rules then you could be facing account deactivation.
Google+ main man Vic Gundotra claims this is to make sure a “positive tone” is set from the outset of the social net which was launched earlier this month with accounts by invite only. At the moment you can only register by a “real” name, and list your alias in your profile information, but Vic suggests that nicknames will be tolerated in the future, but obscure names containing symbols and unnecessary characters won’t. He likens this policy to “when a restaurant doesn’t allow people who aren’t wearing shirts to enter.”
It’s quite a step back from the personal and casual approach Google used in its sale spiel in an attempt to win us over to Google+.
It’s concerning for those such as myself, who are more commonly known by less formal and abbreviated versions of our full names. Seems like it’s play nice or beg your Facebook pals to take you back before you know it!
Doesn’t social networking increasingly feel like we’re being catalogued?
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