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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
by wisty 15y ago
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.
- brudgers 15y agoThe 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.
- maratd 15y agoThis has never been a problem for Facebook. People find other people through common friends, not by searching for names.
- jcampbell1 15y agoCorrect me if I am wrong, but Facebook has the same policy and deletes suspiciously named accounts as well.
- wccrawford 15y agoThey technically have the same policy, but they don't seem to be proactive like Google is. Also, Facebook doesn't use your name to find your friends, they use your friends list to suggest their friends might be yours as well. Reason and method are both different.
- notahacker 15y agoIn 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+
- int3rnaut 15y agoI 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.
- mcantor 15y agoI 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!
- jsavimbi 15y agoDo 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.
- Symmetry 15y agoGenerally, I find that I often find that its only worthwhile to find someone on Facebook if I have their real name and common friends.
- raganwald 15y agoAren’t my “semi-friends” more likely to search for “raganwald” than for “Reg Braithwaite?”
- cdcarter 15y agoMaybe for you! I know that a majority of people I meet I introduced with my real name. "Hi! I'm cdcarter." just doesnt roll off the tongue.