<story><title>Why Google cares if you use your real name</title><url>http://scripting.com/stories/2011/07/25/whyGoogleCaresIfYouUseYour.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Matt_Cutts</author><text>For a counter-point, this is what Robert Scoble wrote about his conversation with Vic Gundotra, Google&apos;s head of social: &lt;a href=&quot;https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/Fddn6rV8mBX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/Fddn6rV8...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He [Vic] says that he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn&apos;t allow people who aren&apos;t wearing shirts to enter.&lt;p&gt;He says it isn&apos;t about real names. He says he isn&apos;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 &quot;god&quot; or worse.&lt;p&gt;....&lt;p&gt;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&apos;t just react overnight to community needs).&quot;&lt;p&gt;Just wondering: can non-Google+ users follow the link above and read the post? I ask because Dave Winer said &quot;I can&apos;t point to those articles because only people with Google-Plus accounts can read them, apparently.&quot; But I could pull up that Google+ post just fine, even with a non-logged-in Firefox or incognito Chrome window?</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Google cares if you use your real name</title><url>http://scripting.com/stories/2011/07/25/whyGoogleCaresIfYouUseYour.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonknee</author><text>Dave&apos;s been for a long time the tech version of an old man screaming at kids to get off his lawn. Matching your &quot;Real Name&quot; to advertising partners isn&apos;t at all why Google wants your &quot;Real Name&quot;. They want it because it makes for a better social network. Most Gmail users provide a &quot;Real Name&quot; so Google already had hundreds of millions and so far as I know, hasn&apos;t decided to hook up with my grocery to somehow advertise better to me. They do use interest data, but it&apos;s one-click to opt-out of (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/&lt;/a&gt;) and knowing someone&apos;s name adds little to being able to target ads.</text></comment>