As an outside observer: Real Name was a play at true identity management. There are two true identity managers currently out there: LinkedIn for business, and

As an outside observer: Real Name was a play at true identity management. There are two true identity managers currently out there: LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for personal. No other sites have a larger penetration of "socially validated" / "web of trust" connected with real names, pictures, and some kinds of "social/semi-public" activity. Twitter, Yahoo, etc. have tons of "CoolPerson5583" but correspondingly fewer "true identities" with mutual friends, interaction between members, etc (counter-examples welcome!). This correspondingly increases the value of "true identity" accounts. 100 twitter accounts could be 100 robots all following each other. 100 facebook accounts tied to pretty much any "real-ish" person pretty regularly will get you ~100 real people on the back-end. I'm aware of certain people who may have 2-3 semi-active "alternate" facebook accounts (ie: friends-only v. semi-professional, friends-only v. business-related, friends-only v. alternate-group/identity), but facebook accounts are "more important" than twitter accounts because of the _value_ of the social proof/social connections between "real people" vs. "anonymous speech" or "anonymous acquaintances". A facebook account with very few people in your social circle "vouching for it" would rightfully be greeted with suspicion. A facebook account is very difficult to "take over", as with a sufficient number of connections, your identity in facebook is directly related to who you're connected to in your social network. (these statement also apply to LinkedIn). You simply _cannot_ create/recreate a new facebook or linkedin account in the same way you can create a new twitter account or spotify account. People _KNOW_ you on linkedin/facebook, and even if you "rotate" your account, you'd just end up in the same "slot" in the social network. However on twitter, if I were to make "userfoo123" and "userbar456", those two users could have wildly different personalities/actions/social-circles, etc much more easily than having two accounts on facebook or to accounts on linkedin. GMail/email accounts are sometimes another proxy for "real identity" b/c they are often associated with a particular individual, contain materially sensitive information, and are kindof rough to re-create in case you wanted to change your identity (logins/password resets, etc.). However, gmail/email accounts are much more prone to personal identity management and not _social_ identity management (ie: you log into your bank account w/ your gmail address, but you don't usually directly post cat-memes with your gmail address). Identity management is a tricky thing. They didn't want to be what twitter turned in to... they wanted to be "the white pages / phone book" and steal that job from Facebook/LinkedIn.