As you no doubt know by now the big buzz on the Internet at the moment is Google Plus, the Google guy’s new social networking platform, which since its inception has been doing quite well in gaining momentum and users. However the Google guys have set down certain criteria for having a Google Plus account, most prominent of which seems to be that the user has to use their correct name.
Thus it appears that a victim of Google Plus rules is none other than iPhone hacker and iPhone Dev Team member I’m sure most if not everyone has heard of, MuscleNerd.
Apparently MuscleNerd’s Google Plus account has been suspended because Google Plus doesn’t recognise MuscleNerd they don’t consider his real first and last real birth name according to an article over on My Great iPhone, the author known as LVCIFER, also fell foul of Google Plus real name rule.
Furthermore, Cydia main man, Jay “Saurik” Freeman posted to his Google Plus page on the matter, and here’s what Saurik had to say…
“In the last couple days, Google has taken to quite actively enforcing its “real name” rule, banning or suspending accounts (with many reports of users getting locked out of all of Google, as opposed to just +) with names that “look funny” (such as including symbols, “including period”), as well as actively suspending accounts of users who use non-real names.
For more information, I highly recommend readers read through some of the comments on a recent post by +Robert Scoble, where +Gowtham S, an “infrastructure engineer” at Google (and someone I simply am unable to mention correctly at this point in this post due to what seems like a stupid bug in Google+ involving people with non-unique names) responds with some details on what is being banned.
https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/aUHFm3Q69uw
Personally, I think this is ludicrous… Google’s attempts to enforce what a name is don’t even stand up to the test of multiple cultures, much less the test of an online pseudonymous world. +Gowtham S, even, was forced into the position of specifying a last name, something he does not actually have, and therefore falling back to an initial of his father’s first name.”
Seems to me that perhaps Google is taking too much of a harsh stance when it come to what people which to call themselves when it comes to Google Plus, I mean if you want to call yourself something other than your real name when online, I can’t really see it being a problem especially when the people Google is suspending are rather well know on the internet by their pseudonym rather than their birth moniker.
So do you think Google Plus is being somewhat over the top when it comes to demanding a user uses their real identity or do you feel it’s quite a reasonable demand?