By Marco A. Ayllon
Nautilus Technology News
July 25, 2011
We noticed an issue that had been boiling for several weeks and bubbled over this weekend, as Google apparently accelerated deletions of Google+ accounts because of the site's requirement that members use their real names.Google+ members started complaining about this situation about a week after Google launched the Social Networking site in late June. And over the past three weeks, various Google executives have addressed the issue.
On July 11, Google+ Community Manager Natalie Villalobos tackled the complaints in the site's official discussion forum, reiterating the policy and clarifying the procedure for appealing a deletion.
Still, gripes have continued appearing on the official Google+ discussion board and in other forums like Twitter and personal blogs. The outcry reached a crescendo this weekend when Google zapped the accounts of some high-profile users.
The complaints fall into two categories. There is one group of Google+ users who claim they're using their real names but apparently got their accounts deleted because they have a non-traditional names or their names contain foreign-language characters or letters.
Then there is another camp of people who want to use pseudonyms because they do not want to reveal their real-names for different reasons.
The controversy echoes a concurrent one with public figures and companies that have set up Google+ business profiles, which currently are forbidden and which Google is also deleting. Google hopes to permit business profiles at the next months.
Google maintains that Google+'s content-sharing features and privacy settings are better and easier to use than Facebook's, and that this will prompt a massive defection of Facebook users.
Facebook remains by far the most popular social networking site in the world, with 750 million members and counting. In the next months you could use their new Messenger or Video-Calling powered by Skype which will enable you to send video messages.
