Google has great services, Gmail and Calendar are great, Android is a great mobile platform, and of course there are dozens of other amazing services. They've done some important work to unify the logins, but then they dilute the whole thing by making a second-rate Facebook clone and hoping everyone will flock to it.
Meanwhile though people are realizing that none of these companies really give a shit about your privacy, and even if they do, they don't care enough to really protect it, so inevitably trust will be eroded over time as Facebook, Google and their younger brethren strip-mine the naive goodwill of consumers in search of the new shiny. You already see teenagers abandoning Facebook because it doesn't have the privacy they want (everyone and their mother's mother is on there). I think this trend will accelerate over the next decade and we'll look back and laugh at the pipe-dreams of these companies thinking that they could consolidate and own the whole social graph.
The irony is Google is much better positioned for this future than Facebook is. Let them have unified accounts, let them datamine everything, just stop worshipping at the alter of Zuckerberg like he's the second coming of Steve Jobs.
Google, Facebook need to stop this real name policy or ease it. Having real name real identity, a page that people can view as they search on Google is great for some people. If you are celebrity or some famous programmer or mathematician, you probably don't mind. And usually these people get official "verification" if they are truly famous people. You see that a lot on Twitter and Facebook.
Sometimes I can careless about people's real name and instead I pay more attention to their pseudo identity, their username in this case. It's a choice and we should be more willing to make this real name policy flexible.
I still use G+ for friend's communication but other than that it has no use for me. I don't get 10000 followers like Linus does so why should I care about having a real name?
If Gmail is happy with James Bond why can't I use James Bond (I am just making it up)?
http://elliott.org/problem-solved/google-plus-says-my-name-i...
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebooks-forgotten-rule-fa...
Why would anyone need to provide some documentation to show that he or she is who he or she claims to be?
Yes, there is a value. I often find people I read on technical paper or newspaper or from tweet and I can find out their contact information by Googling their names. That's great, but I argue that they don't need to "police" users. They shouldn't "police" users. The user isn't doing transaction. It's just a Google plus profile. Plenty of people stay "anonymous" with a pen name. Take Bitcoin's "inventor". Should anyone use that name the second time, will Google just say "no, prove to me you are this guy?" People who wish to be searched will always enter their real name. In fact, my wild guess is most Google users always enter real name when they first sign up for Gmail and therefore, Google doesn't need to worry about people provoding fake name. I know Google wants to provide better social and identity graph, but again, there is a limit to how much Google should "police" this real name policy. I can call myself "Jesus Christ" and my guess is Google will not accept that. I have a friend named "Mee You"....
Disclaimer: I am not a guy who hate Google or have anything against Google+ and I personally am okay with Google showing me on search result, but on the case of real name policy I am a nay-sayer.
