Dave's been for a long time the tech version of an old man screaming at kids to get off his lawn. Matching your "Real Name" to advertising partners isn't at all why Google wants your "Real Name". They want it because it makes for a better social network. Most Gmail users provide a "Real Name" so Google already had hundreds of millions and so far as I know, hasn't decided to hook up with my grocery to somehow advertise better to me. They do use interest data, but it's one-click to opt-out of (http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/) and knowing someone's name adds little to being able to target ads.
I don't think it's a stretch to characterize Dave Winer as a curmudgeon. He has made valuable contributions and I respect him, but he's still a curmudgeon.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at my comments here on HN and say that I’m cranky. Nevertheless, that doesn’t in any way add to a debate over my specific comment: Either I’m right or I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, say so and explain why. Saying (correctly) that I’m a cranky guy is still an Ad Hominem.
Summary: Ad Hominems can be factually correct yet they are still Ad Hominems and still the lowest form of disagreement.
And my point in this case isn’t that the entire argument was an Ad Hominem, but rather that it was a (possibly correct) Ad Hominem followed by a perfectly reasonable point. I stand by my assertion that the point is stronger on its own without the Ad Hominem.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t in any way add to a debate over my specific comment
This assumes that the OP's only goal was to debate. I opine that his secondary goal was to be a little cheeky and possibly evoke a chuckle, which was successfully achieved with me! You can interpret the "curmudgeon" comment as an ad hominem to the extent that his exclusive concern was the logical presentation of his argument, which I do not think is true for most cases in human discourse, on or off the internet.
I disagree. If someone responded face to face to a comment in a public debate by you by making a personal remark "wanting to be a little cheeky and evoke a chuckle", you would absolutely interpret it as being an attempt at ridiculing you and lowering the value of your opinion in the eyes of the audience, and you'd very likely be right. That is the essence of an ad hominem argument.
For what it's worth, I would (and have!) absolutely call someone out for being a curmudgeon face to face. I even called myself out on it the other day after trying to explain to a friend why I was turned off by Spotify.
Obligatory pedantic reply: the OP would be engaging in ad hominem if he argued that Dave Winer is wrong about real names on g+ because he's a curmudgeon. Instead, he argued that Dave Winer is wrong about real names on g+, and also he's a curmudgeon.
This is an incredibly silly claim that people who enjoy engaging in and supporting ad hominem always make when ad hominem is pointed out. Grandparent absolutely intends his insult, in proximity to his argument, to undermine his disputant's credibility. He doesn't need to literally say, "because he's a curmudgeon, his argument is wrong" for it to be ad hominem.
"Grandparent absolutely intends his insult, in proximity to his argument, to undermine his disputant's credibility."
I don't think that that is clear at all. In fact, his derision reads more like a thesis statement to me: "X is a curmudgeon. Why? Well, because of statements like Y."
The first thing the grandparent says is that Dave is a curmudgeon. It's absolutely an ad-hominem, more specifically it is the poisoning the well[1] variety. Everything read after the opening sentence is tainted with the idea that Dave's actions are that of a curmudgeon. Most ad-hominem's are accidental; they're so prevalent in internet discussions that it's difficult not to engage in it, so I'm sure the grandparent meant no harm. He had a genuinely good point, but I agree that it's somewhat ruined by the well poisoning.
My claim is pedantic, but it's not silly. I'm not a fan of either ad hominem or garden-variety insults, as I hope my comment history will demonstrate, but I do think it's worth drawing the distinction on principle.
>They want it because it makes for a better social network.
Psueudoanonymous accounts certainly haven't made Twitter a worse social network. My stream would be considerably duller without them.
Ideally, Google should allow those who only want to interact with real named accounts to indicate this in their account settings. Filtering, not censorship, is in order.
Yeah, you have a point. I'm willing to put up with the spam for getting to read anonymous viewpoints, but others my not be, so ideally it should be an option.
How exactly does it make for a better social network?
Blizzard tried, awhile back, to enforce the real name restriction to their bulletin boards, to disastrous effect. Developers were outed and harassed, and the general consensus was that having real names wouldn't affect the trolls in any meaningful way.
I forsee a lot of John/Jane Smith's on Google+ in the coming years.
In World of Warcraft's case, most of the people on your "Friends" list are just other characters you've played with, whereas with Google+, your "Friends" are usually people you actually know by name and face. I think it's understandable why Blizzard's community would be more concerned about revealing personal information than Google+'s.
At work, so I can't look up the references, but this isn't in relation to the friends list, this is in relation to their official forums. Their original proposal, prior to being shot down by the players, was that every post had a person's real name attached to it in an effort to "improve the community".
For general/anonymous discussion, it might not be a big deal, but if you want to talk about one of your characters, then you're still associating the character with your own name.
Yes, that connection could be problematic, but not nearly as big an issue as when people took a developer's name and started posting personal details about that developer (including, but not limited to, where that developer's children went to school).
I suspect you are correct. I think Google wants G+ to be a useful way for people to find people they know, as that is the sole reason many people are on Facebook.
I think it has more to do with Facebook and Microsoft taking away quite significant parts of the online ad revenue. Facebook is economically destroying Google in terms of display ads.
Companies don't have loyalties to either company, they just go where the best value is. Currently thats Facebook.
Google developed an attention economy, and Facebook has improved it.
I suppose we disagree on what the worth is. I think the worth is making a better social network (which is valuable to Google for a number of reasons), not for being able to better target advertising.
The early days of a social network are critical for setting the tone and Google knows that. They see the comment quality on YouTube and are not proud of it. Do you think YouTube comment quality would increase if it were tied to people's real names? I do.
"He [Vic] says that he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter.
He says it isn't about real names. He says he isn't using his legal name here. He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like "god" or worse.
....
He also says they are working on ways to handle pseudonyms, but that will be a while before the team can turn on those features (everyone is working hard on a raft of different things and can't just react overnight to community needs)."
Just wondering: can non-Google+ users follow the link above and read the post? I ask because Dave Winer said "I can't point to those articles because only people with Google-Plus accounts can read them, apparently." But I could pull up that Google+ post just fine, even with a non-logged-in Firefox or incognito Chrome window?
He [Vic] says that he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter.
He says it isn't about real names. He says he isn't using his legal name here. He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like "god" or worse.
There are a few problems with this as implemented in Google+. (Correct me if I'm misinformed, I haven't been able to keep on top of all the new news.)
EDIT: I made some wrong assumptions, particularly about how your Google accounts are tied together, see Matt's reply below.
1) The rules are apparently not being made clear. If I see "no shirt, no shoes, no service" on the entrance I know exactly what that means. When you sign up for Google+ I'm pretty sure it doesn't say "Upside down characters and offensive names will lead to all your Google accounts getting irreversibly banned." Maybe there's some language buried in the TOS. That's not good enough.
2) Google is changing the rules (or enforcement of the rules) late in the game. If someone has had a Gmail account for 5 years using a pseudonym and Google just now decides to lock them out of it when they try to sign up for Google+, that is Google's fault. At least warn them of the offense before banning or prevent them from using Google+ while still allowing access to their Gmail.
3) No recourse. I know Gmail is a free service, but people still use it for registering on financial websites and priceless family correspondence. It is tied to someone's identity. Google needs to have a well defined and timely path of recourse for people who get banned for minor offenses. Directing all customer support requests to /dev/null is not acceptable.
Your #2 and #3 points seem to assume that if your profile name violates the policy, your Gmail access is suspended, but that's not true. If your profile is suspended for not having a real/common name, that only affects services that use your profile (Google+/Buzz/+1). It doesn't affect other services like Gmail, Blogger, Docs, or Calendar that don't use your profile. So you can continue to use Gmail even if you can't use Google+.
In the US, you basically can't provide online services like Gmail to anyone < 13 years old. When the kid created his Gmail account he must have lied about his birthday (or they wouldn't have let him signup). Then when he did his Google+ profile, he gave his real age. Google, now knowing his real age, didn't have much choice.
That said, the haziness around what will get your Google account banned is keeping me off Google+. Even if the terms are nuanced, I don't have any faith that my account would be restored if it were suspended in error.
When the kid created his Gmail account he must have lied about his birthday (or they wouldn't have let him signup).
No. When the kid was identified as being from the Netherlands, they didn't bother asking his age because he doesn't live in a country where it is a legal issue.
Then they asked him for Google+, and once they discovered his age they banned him due to the US law.
"it is about... removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters"
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
The ones who dare to spell their names with upside down characters.
The ones whose parents didn't give them enough attention so they have to spend their days testing the boundaries of internet communities and then throwing a fit because their wingding character isn't supported.
That's a pretty flippant attitude, considering people are losing access to critical stuff like all their emails for making the mistake of violating some rule buried in a 20 page TOS.
Hi Matt -- I got complaints from people on Twitter saying they couldn't click through to a page I linked to on Google-Plus. I probably should have said that specifically in the post (though I did say it in a comment).
Gotcha--if you want to point me to a couple of those tweets, I can pass that on to Google+ folks to check into. If someone shares a post publicly (as opposed to sharing with a limited circle of people), we definitely want people to be able to read those public posts.
I went to look but it was a couple of days ago, and that's hundreds of messages down the list in my Mentions tab on Twitter. And with 140 chars, I'm basically scanning for grunts and snorts. But I can do you better. Here's a list of all my links for the last few months. Some of those go to GP articles. Those are the ones people are complaining about.
It's a rabbit hole. You'd think that banning the name anti is a good heuristic given handles like anti Christ. But anti is a perfectly valid name in parts of eastern Europe.
For me their philosophy is clear. Each G+ user needs to be identifiable. They are not against pseudonyms per se but if your pseudonym means they can't identify you then "off with your head" - Otherwise how can they sell advertising?
This is the real cost we pay for google's "free" services. (BTW I don't as long as I can use a pseudonym of some sort).
Thanks for confirming, polymer. It was strange to read that section of Winer's article. Just so people know: if you're viewing a post, I believe you can click on the timestamp to the right of the person's name, e.g. "Yesterday 9:45 PM (edited 3:02 AM)" to get a permalink to the post.
Or if you see the post in your stream, I think you can also click the dropdown arrow at the top-right of the post and select "Link to this post."
> (everyone is working hard on a raft of different things and can't just react overnight to community needs)
This attitude is interesting to me. Why not? It can't be because of scale, can it? New users are being throttled.
Isn't responding quickly, perhaps overnight or even within a few days, exactly what you need to make this nascent product work well?
Such sluggishness is interesting, and instructive of the perils in getting big, even when being a startup is somewhere in the DNA. But I wonder what opportunities it creates, and for whom. Like an airline fare war, I wonder if Facebook might decide that rapid evolution was worth the short term cost to make Google hurt. Of course, Facebook is bulky itself these days, too.
I don't think that Google is especially slow in this area (e.g. they've been very responsive when mega-posts by very popular people were causing a bunch of noise). Instead, I think it's because Google is trying to do a bunch of different things that need engineering cycles. When Google+ launched, people wanted first-class integration with Google Apps. People has also been clamoring for business/entity pages, not just personal pages. Those are both important and will take some time. There's just a lot to do, even for a service that's only a few weeks old.
Oy. Maybe if you have a relatively Googleable name like "Dave Winer", you could expect your theory to hold. But GOOGLE SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Try correlating my name (Michael Roberts) with anything just by name. It can't be done. There are an estimated 5589 Michael Robertses in the US (howmanyofme.com) and several of us in any given town. And my legal first name is actually James, so you can't correlate that with airline reservations anyway (thanks so very much, TSA).
No, Google really didn't think this through here. And the "hoo-ha" (I'm not sure that means what you think it means) is about more than that. It's about a ToS that says "use the name your friends know you by" - often a pseudonym. Google will still delete your account with no recourse.
(This even omits the real-world examples of people who don't fit Google's Anglo naming assumptions - the real world really does consist of about 20% impossible hacks, and you'd think Google, of all companies, would get that, but they seem not to.)
Of course, Google's famous omission of any discernible customer service or appeals process only plays into this even more.
No, it's a trainwreck. Google is responding well, and it's true it's still actually a beta - but pseudonymity is important, and the ability to correlate with banking records is broken anyway. So why stick with it?
Lastname + zip is more than accurate enough to drive a lot of value for advertisers. It doesn't take a lot of precision to improve advertising efficiency. Link a creditcard to your google account and you're marketer's wet dream.
That's nice. The factor is about 5000. Census records are used for howmanyofme.com (1990 and 2000) - there were 423,777 Robertses versus 2,406 Winers, and there were over 4,000,000 Michaels versus 82,000 Daves.
I'm sure there are "lots" of people with your name in the US, but you aren't named Michael Roberts. Trust me. I am unGoogleable.
I doubt it. Google wants your real name so it's easier for your semi-friends to find you, and drive "engagement".
I'm pretty sure my classmate from high school won't find me I sign up under the name "wisty". Which would be a mixed blessing, but very bad for business. OK, there are a few internet celebrities who are best know by "handles", but they aren't the bread and butter of social networks.
In the beginning Facebook was far more restrictive in requiring a university email as well as a real name to sign up. If it had instead launched based on an open invitation system and not policed pseudonymous accounts then marketers and trolls would have ensured it remained an insignificant niche site.
If anything, real names were far more critical to Facebook's success than they might be to Google+
I have friends with the facebook names Hiphopopotomus, Joseph Stalin, and Professor X--and they've had these stupid names, that aren't their real names for a long long time--if there is a policy like this in place on FB they aren't really enforcing it.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. One of my friends has been named "Bubonic Johnson" ("Johnson" is not any part of his name) for over a year and Facebook hasn't nuked his account from orbit yet!
Do you have any statistics to back up your blanket assertion?
I find that searching for a specific person through a common friend is a tedious exercise of first going to that common friend's page, locating their friend list and then typing the specific person's first name to filter the list. This is not always fruitful as you would need to know that a specific person is in fact a friend of your suspected common friend, otherwise their profile would not come up in your filtered search.
However, if you type their name in the search input, Facebook will assist you by first finding friends of friends and then people of that name close to your home location.
Friending people as they come up tagged in common friend's activities is not search, it's affinity engagement, which is best achieved when you use your real name or the name most people know you by.
The fact that Google wants your semi-friends to find you is not a counter argument to the point that your real name is more valuable. Indeed, it points to a positive feedback loop which further increases the value of requiring real names, i.e. Google gets a map of your social graph which only contains real names.
Yeah, this article is off. The idea that Google + would then take your name and sell it to it's partners while linking to its DFA data is an incredible breach of PII and they would be hit hard by the government immediately. As someone who works with these data feeds and digital marketing, I know it's not what they're aiming for and that it would be in violation. As others have pointed out the effort is in better matching and spreading of social circles. In doing so, Google + becomes a more widely used tool and, the relationships that a user has with others increases. Couple that with the idea of circles and future search, discussion and buying habits of the user, Google can then understand the influences different parts of the network have on the individual and tailor the advertising a user sees to the messages coming from the influential networks.
They don’t have to sell the information to their partners. They could, for example, buy information associating last names and ZIP codes with estimated income levels, and then tell advertisers, “if you pay us $X we will put your ad on those Google+ pages where, according to our statistical estimate, at least 75% of the readers make over $100K.” The advertisers wouldn’t actually know the names of the people that Google forwards the ad to; they would just get the clicks.
There are a number of ways for Google to do that based on network, searches and other information that give them a high statistical probability of being right without having to go through the trouble of actually matching names with lists. That's a capability that goes right into retargeting/remarketing lists and certain ad servers.
I think there are two reasons for making people use their real names, and it's not this. One is preventing non-person entities from using the service. Nobody wants a "friend" that's "Mashable News" or "Coca Cola". When these accounts start following you, it's worse than spam. If you want to advertise, buy an ad so I can block it.
Secondly is the "anonymous people are jackasses" problem that's pervasive everywhere on the Internet. If people have to use their real names, they will behave on G+ as they would in person, which makes for a nicer experience.
Anyway, you can legally change your name to whatever you want (I have a friend whose US passport says "Ingy döt Net"), so if you really consider yourself to be your nickname, get a government ID with that nickname on it. Problem solved. (This problem is also solved with Photoshop, FWIW.)
> There's a very simple business reason why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it's possible to cross-relate your account with your buying behavior with their partners.
The idea that google somehow wants track your behavior through your name is laughable. Do a facebook search for your name. Do you see all those results? Those are all false positives that google would have to build algorithms to try and weed out.
... or (assuming they actually wanted to track users in this way), they could just use the unique-by-definition email address you registered with, or the unique-by-definition credit card number you used in google checkout, or get that information from AdWords partners when they track conversions ...
Since there are a thousand better (and less noticeable/public) ways to track users, we can safely ignore google wanting to "cross-relate your account with your buying behavior" as a possible motivation.
I doubt the marketing rationale. Most G+ accounts will be connected to older Gmail accounts, which are themselves likely to be the point-of-contact for most online transactions (and, if not, it's going to be same_name@yahoo.com, etc.). So it seems like Google already has the best identifier it could possibly get, the Gmail name, which can be cross-referenced even to otherwise anonymized data.
The only reason is for their power.People have some tolerance for corporate greed, but little to none for blatant corporate power grabs. They are literally killing it right before our eyes for lack of understanding. People won't use the system if they insist they get to know everything about you solely for their benefit. No matter how they spin it, it's just not gonna fly. Watch.
I'd argue that using the real name helps the community in the end, because people behave "better" when taken away this anonymity. I have the feeling that up until now the conversations i had on google+ and the content i have seen has a far better quality then facebook or twitter.
If this is worth the trade-off is up to everyone himself...
'Better', for varying definitions of the term. When identified, people behave as to protect themselves from social criticism. That may involve not post profanities in others' posts, but it may also involve not posting stuff that goes against the status quo.
good point. i'm still not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing.
My personal experience was: i entered google+ with my nick name and switched to my real name on my own, before those deletions took place... don't ask me why, it was just a feeling?
As i especially enjoy the locality based stream, i enjoy not having to read too much crap :P
Also, posting against the status quo is kind of natural in the internet, the difference is HOW and not WHAT is said..
On the other hand:
Around 15-20% of my facebook friends use fake names out of privacy concerns and in general don't post crap. They still have their own, good reasons to not use their real name..
I think a social community should either be completely anonymous or completely named. Both Google+ and 4chan are great in their own ways. It's when there's a mixture of anonymity and not (twitter) where things can get frustrating.
What does that matter? If people know you by your screen name, that's a real name. Legal names are just nick names that are recorded by the government.
Let me suggest the true issue isn't real vs. pseudonymous or common vs. contrived, but whether names are cheap and disposable.
When identities are cheap and disposable, lots of mischief becomes more prevalent, like spam and harassment.
When Google says they want 'common names', what they mean is they want names that already have a history of investment. That is, nothing created solely for the purpose of participation on GooPlu.
This benefits Google a lot: it makes you less likely to 'burn' your GooPlu account with one-time mischief. It makes it easier for other acquaintances to build out their 'circles' by finding you. It even lets Google loosely correlate data from other sources (like their web crawls) with your GooPlu presence (for customization and ad targeting).
Temporary, single-purpose identities are like masks. Society only welcomes masks in certain places and times. Even just a few masks in a forum that otherwise doesn't have them can change (or ruin) the character completely.
You are missing the point entirely. This isn't a justification at all, it is an explanation. The article asserts that they can monetize single real names. Some people don't have those, but if Google thinks that they can't monetize that, why should they care?
That is what the article is saying. It didn't miss a thing, it just didn't spell it out in simple english for you.
And for the record, I do not agree with the article that this is the cause of Google's actions.
Look again at the other post from yesterday - the post that talks about how Google realises that there may be a case for not having a single name to rule them all, and that they were looking at way of making the alternative model work, i.e. make money for them.
Google knows who you are. Google knows where you've been on the web, and what you're doing. They long have. Google told me on my own + page several of the pseudonyms I've used across the web.
The "Google wants to sell you" bit is not insightful. It's not a unique perspective. It's the same superficial analysis we see with every single thing Google does.
Google wants an online community of real people, with what that entails. There is a long and documented trail of discussions on this topic regarding the downsides of anonymity. Yet there are also upsides, and if someone wants an anonymous discussion forum that supports that, there are plenty of options for that.
But it is wholly inconsistent with the goals of Google+.
Alas. Whatever Google does, just say it's because they want to sell you out. It's a clean, pat answer.
"It's the same superficial analysis we see with every single thing Google does."
Superficial isn't a synonym of "wrong". Sometimes the superficial explanation is the correct one. Sometimes people expend a lot of cognitive effort looking for the complex, nuanced answer when the superficial one was correct all along.
And sometimes not, of course.
But I would argue that the idea that Google isn't giving one thought to how much money Google+ is going to make them is the bizarre position, absurd on its face.
I'd also observe that any given action does not need to have one motive. Google can want a "real community" (also because a "real community" is more likely to be active, cause people to spend more time on Google+, and thus see more ads and generate more ad revenue), and also want to have better information with which to target you. There's no contradiction, and there's no way in which one is the "real" motivation and the other is false, they're all just mixed together. There's a whole lot of people here trying to draw lines about what's the real motivation and what isn't when there's no room to draw the lines in the first place.
It is a synonym for "barely worthy of anyone's time.
And yes, of course Google wants Google+ to make them money. But saying "they want a healthy, vibrant, non-threatening community...thus allowing them more page visits and thus ad impressions, thus allowing them to make lots of money" has a completely different synergy than "they want your name so they can sell it".
Google told me on my own + page several of the pseudonyms I've used across the web.
Where exactly? I don't see anything like that on mine, and I'm curious whether Google knows who orangecat is. (Of course they may anyway even if they don't tell me).
Hogwash! it is not legally permitted to target advertising using real identities, ads are targeted at demographics, and a name has no value to ad targeting anyway, interests are what used for targeting ads not names.
There are many legitimate reasons to insist on real names within a social application, adding trustworthiness to sharing and trusting that you are communicating with the right person being among them.
> it is not legally permitted to target advertising using real identities,
[citation required]. As stated, this can't be right because my physical mailbox is chock full of real identity advertising - mostly related to credit cards but not only.
Real names are valuable in so far as they can be used to build gender (and possibly ethnicity?) models. I doubt this is the primary reason Google is insisting on real names, however. More like: Myspace allowed fake names and it failed. Facebook enforces real names and it has succeeded.
Hmm, so Gmail showing you ads based on the email you're currently reading is unlawful? I think you have a weird (i.e., excessively narrow) definition of "target advertising to inviduals".
They are targeting you, yes. But "you" is loosely defined as someone who reads email newsletters about cat toys, not necessarily "John Smith, cat toy enthusiast".
Kind of obvious, I just hope this kind of idea is picked up by the media. It's also why Google+ has some very tricky rules in regards to what becomes public on your profile, because publicly indexed information can be used and monetized more than the private information. That's why Google has made all the "revolutionary" platforms that it has been, and why Schmidt says so many scary things that should make us feel sick.
Facebook's doing the same thing though, Google and them are both selling our identities, interests, social connects and other data to the highest bidder. But the handsets are cheap.
It's becoming more and more clear that we are Google's product and not their customer. Google is bending over backwards to ensure we are a saleable commodity.
I feel like at this point the "don't be evil" motto is not useful. The real question is "who wins when the interests of us, web searcher/service users, comes into conflict with their customers, advertisers?"
