The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.
The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.
I think the best use of executives is to support people in the trenches, because they're closest to the actual work. That support can include thoughtful questioning, advising, and mentoring. But when it becomes controlling, it often gets ugly.
I just happened to chat today with a guy who built a large and successful construction company up from nothing. He said that his philosophy was always to hire good people and support them. Eventually it was running well enough that he got bored with it and sold it to the employees. He's now starting an incubator for manufacturing businesses because for him the fun part is helping people get things going. I think he'll be successful, because handing down decisions on high is entirely uninteresting to him.
I have friends from the pre Internet online communities (telecom gold and Prestel) who would probably not even know my real name as we went by handles I even have a dedication using that name in a booker (think uk version of the Pulitzer prize) shortlisted authors book about that time "cybergypsies" by Indra Sinha.
I know it's easy to project actions on others, but really, that was a BAD decision.
That is it. There are hundreds of other services for instant/asynchronous messaging, photo sharing, etc. but only Facebook knows everyone in my life by the same names I do.
I can discover and communicate with anyone I might have heard about in my real life on Facebook because (and only because) they use their real name on Facebook.
Discoverability by real name is the point of Facebook. There are certainly other social networks (i.e. Tumblr, instagram, HN) that people use as online personas separate from their real identities, but Google pretty clearly wanted a piece of Facebook's pie. Pseudonymous Google+ would have been an entirely different community. Maybe a more successful one, but not in the same space as Facebook at all, and not what Google was trying to do.
Interestingly, people use Tumblr as a much more intimate venue, in part because you just can't hold that many people's pseudonyms in your head - at my school, only fairly close friends got to know each other's Tumblr URLs.
Yup, and it's also it's greatest weakness. Hence the abandonment of Facebook by millennials to communication mediums that are inherently private—SnapChat, Kik, and anything else that doesn't put their behavior on the Internet, Google-able in one hop by authority figures.
Facebook is great for middle-aged people with stable (boring) lives who want a digital scrapbook to share with similar people. Hence all of the photos of people's kids.
