"Do no evil."
This is the Google mantra. The problem, of course, is "what do you mean by evil?", because to quote another great aphorism, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
The geniuses at Google decided to create a social network, "Google Plus" or G+ as we like to call it. They decided that for a social network to work (and more importantly, to maximize connections), people had to find each other. So far, so good.
Then they made their main mistake... they decided that people are known only by their real names. Apparently, the Google geniuses don't actually use the Internet (which explains Google Glass, I guess).
There's a whole culture around using aliases on the Internet, and many people are known only by their aliases. I've gone by the alias The Werewolf for almost 40 years - it dates back to the old BBS days where you call a board directly over a modem. My artwork is signed with it - I never use my real name. For all intents and purposes - to the Internet - I am "The Werewolf". If someone is looking for me, that's the name they'll search for.
Admittedly, "The Werewolf" is a problematic name. It's really generic. Other people use it too. But guess what? There are three people who share my real name at the pharmacy I use for prescriptions. "Real names" aren't any more unique. So sometimes I'm "Theo Werewolf" which sounds more like a real name and is actually fairly unique.
Anyway, during a week that was filled with being evacuated from my apartment because of floods, having to live in my car for part of a weekend because of that, getting almost no sleep because of running around to //build/ in San Francisco and then a trip to Vancouver - I come home to find my G+ account suspended because someone at Google decided "The Werewolf" was too creative to be a real name.
God knows, we can't have creativity or whimsy at Google.
Weirdly, Blogger does let you use an alias because they're keyed to your email address, not your name. Which makes more sense. So, should my G+ account go dark, I'll be here.
If anyone cares.
Cheers.
Actually, their policy is _way_ more confusing than just making you use your real name. It's bizarre. They don't seem to really care whether it's your real name, which they'd be hard-pressed to police anyway.
ReplyDeleteIt's apparently that they want _common_ names. So if your name sounds reasonably like it might be a "normal" name, they don't care if it's fake, but if your name is weird, or you pick a handle that doesn't appear to be a name at all, they hassle you.
The policy is vague, confusing even to their staff, unevenly enforced, and discriminatory to people like myself who have unusual names, and to people like you, who are simply trying to use the handle that everyone knows them by.
I don't think I've even ever _asked_ your real name - I've known you by The Werewolf, from your art, and posting in various communities, for twenty of those forty years you've been using the handle.
Google isn't the antichrist, and they do lots of good stuff and make good products. But they're impossibly big, and when a group of humans gets big enough, it's bound to allow a certain amount of stupid to fester.
I don't know if you recall the Werelist, but when I ran that, allowing people to conceal their real-life identities was a _must_. The topics discussed, while perfectly reasonable, and necessary for our community, were very often the sorts of things that could make people's real-life family and contacts freak out. If we'd had a real name policy, it would have prevented the community or dialog from even occurring.
I didn't say Google * was * evil. I'm saying that they're doing evil. :-)
DeleteOthers have complained of Google+'s seemingly-arbitrary account policies. It cannot be only for “real names” as I follow companies and publications on it. My impression is that they want G+ to be for monetizable entities; that is, something a person could contact for commercial purposes. I bet if you had a business named “The Werewolf” they would allow it.
ReplyDeleteI agree, but they also want to maximise connections to improve advertising analysis. So they want people to be as easy to find and comedy to as possible... Even if the person really doesn't want loss of contacts.
DeleteIt's lose-lose for someone like me.