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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 16 2014, @03:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the arrows-buy-ennui-utter-gnome-our-crust-as-wheat dept.

According to the Google+ Page, Google is finally giving up on forcing everyone to user their real names to join Google+.

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.

I know many folks that refused to join Plus, just because of the restrictions and the fact that they *cough* suggest you to anyone in your contacts. They've given up on youtube comments, app store ratings, and a dozen other things that require Plus accounts.

Some might now join, though most probably won't simply because Google was so darn stubborn about this for so darn long.

What say the Soylentils?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2014, @10:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2014, @10:09PM (#70002)

    > Now Duckduckgo is doing some kind of redirection too.

    You can get rid of those redirects on both google and ddg and most anywhere with this firefox addon:

    Redirect Cleaner [mozilla.org]

    The only downside for me is that it interferes with the color of visited links. If the "cleaned" link is in my history, firefox still colors the link as unvisited unless I move the mouse over the link. I guess redirect cleaner only rewrites URLs on mouse-over rather than on page-load.

    Still, it is a big net improvement, both in time-to-load and in reduced tracking.