For a company that specialises in learning as much as possible about us, our preferences, and our behaviour, Google really does appear to be uncommonly clueless about how we really act, think and live our lives online.
Google Buzz sank without a trace when the company made the mistaken assumption that everyone in your contact list is your “friend”. This, thought a journalist in possession of a cabinet minister's contact details, and a woman still in touch with an abusive ex, is not entirely true.
Google has only one objective, and that is to advertise at you.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
Google Wave was just a confusing mess. It promised to tie all your activities together in a grand collaborative nirvana, but few people were willing to relearn everything they thought they knew about documents, e-mail and social interaction.
Now Google is trying again, with Google+.
Conceptually, it appears to be more than Twitter, and less than Facebook. The notion of “circles” of contacts is clever. There are reasons to try it, and reasons to like it, but its policy about who you are online shows that the company simply doesn't get it.
Its names policy requires you to use your real name: “It's important to use your common name so that the people you want to connect with can find you. Your common name is the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you.”
Google claims to be able to police and verify this, but how will it do so? Surely it doesn't expect to check government-issued identity documents, or believe that these are reliable? Oh, wait, it does.
If your “common name” happens to be JP, or TJ, and nobody knows you as anything else, tough. Initials are verboten. Penelope Jane Dunlop, for example, has a problem. How many “people who want to connect with her can find her” under this name? Most of us know her as PJ Powers, but that name violates the Google+ policy twice.
Companies, interest groups, sub-identities for particular projects, variations based on whether you interact with your professional circle, project members, family, or friends, are all disallowed.
Do you want to discuss sexual identity with a group of like-minded individuals, but without revealing who you really are? Tough luck. You'll do it where people you don't know can blackmail you, and your boss and your mother can watch.
In need of anonymous trauma counselling? Harden up. Nobody cares about your fears and insecurities. At least, not unless they can humiliate you down at the pub, or can track you down to take revenge.
Want to keep a protest movement or the media informed of the oppression of tyrants? Make sure to use your real name, so the thugs who “want to connect with you can find you”.
Ready to blow the whistle on crime or corruption? Better log off Google+ today, or you'll be logging out of your job tomorrow.
One of the most famous examples of successful corporate interaction with social networks is a guy called @rbjacobs on Twitter. He's the First National Bank guy. Well, by “guy”, I mean he is the bank's customer service centre. This account violates the Google+ names policy in almost every respect. It represents multiple people. It is not a real name. It contains initials. And somewhere, there's probably a real person who feels impersonated.
Are you a newspaper, wanting to send live reporting or headlines to readers around the clock? Not using Google+ you don't.
Are you an activist, who lives only for whales, or tortoise crossings, or solar power? You're plain Jane Smith. Who do you think you are? Gaia's Saviour?
Are you a public personality, trying to have a private life too? Google wants everyone to know that you have a family with vulnerable children. Or that you secretly suffer from depression, have taken up therapeutic decoupage, and are in a circle of people who collect vintage battery-operated stimulation devices.
Even if none of these valid reasons for pseudonyms hold, for you, you're still pretty stuck if you're John Smith. Even people with uncommon names usually have a few namesakes. But Google doesn't want you to call yourself anything else, so there's no obvious way to distinguish yourself from the eponymous hordes.
Google doesn't appear to have any idea how people interact on social media. Some people use their own identities. Others use their own names, but construct public personas. Others have multiple identities, for different purposes and different reasons. For others, identity is mutable, depending on what's fashionable. For some, identity depends on what you do for a living. For others, it depends on what you do for fun. For others still, it depends on what you do for charity, or your god, or your community.
The Google Name Policy proves that Google doesn't get us.
Google seems to be of the view that social networks are somehow improved if it ties all your activities into a single identity. This undoubtedly makes it easier for Google to target advertising at you. In fact, permission to do so is quite blatantly the first thing Google+ asks for when you sign up.
The mission of a successful company is to solve a customer's problem better than the competition does it. Profit may be the motive of business, but profit is not a function of how greedy you are. If it was, we'd all be rich. Profit is a function of your ability to help others. If you don't solve a customer's problem, you won't profit from your ability to serve that customer. This is elementary economics.
Google doesn't get this either.
It doesn't want to provide a service that solves your problems. It wants a service that solves its own problem. It doesn't want to help you communicate in whatever way you feel most comfortable or however it best suits your interests. It doesn't want to make it easier to manage your multiple masks and identities and pseudonyms and social networks. Google has only one objective, and that is to advertise at you.
Luckily, there's an easy way out. Don't like it? Lump it. No, really. That's also part of Google's name policy.
“We understand that your identity on Google+ is important to you, and our Name Policy may not be for everyone at this time. We'd hate to see you go, but if you choose to leave, make a copy of your Google+ data first. Then click here to leave Google+.”
Click. Bye. Good luck to you, Google.
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