This is not a startup, and Google is not required or incented to explain to us their vision. What is patently obvious is that the vision they are *pretending* to sell us is an utter crock, but what is easily as unrealistic is that we actually believe that our opinion matters in this. There must be a massive profit at the other end of this policy, because enforcing it must be costing Google a fortune, both in manpower and good will…

So they can grant us the privacy we want while still mining our text strings for information that advertisers pay money for. Google+ is simply their next data mine. They want people to use thier real names because being relatively certain that one user instances equals one human being increases the value of their data.

They aren’t exercising authority, or trying to impose social standards, they are keeping their data as clean as possible.

They fumbled in their horrible underestimation in how important this issue was to users. But they did that because their eye wasn’t on the ball, not because they have any particular interest in people’s actual identity. They have an interest in making sure that one account equals one human being.

I am guilty of purposely keeping a low profile in technology. However, I applaud you for poking your head about the parapet. It’s just such a shame that in a world that is becoming increasingly highly fluid in its communciations and in a hghly expanded manner, that women are not taking more of a lead in this area -after all communications is our forte!
Susan Morrow
Head of R&D
Avoco Secure (A nice company to work in if your female)

Really that is now my goal….Thanks to your timely blogpost :)

An excellent note of gratitude. I wasn’t sure why I liked your writing style, so I ran it through the “I write Like” engine, and as it turns out, you write like Jane Autin[1] – my other favorite author :)

1. http://iwl.me/b/cf96f889

Here is the text of his comment (and I appreciate the points!) :

“Since the site did not accept the comment…

This is a reply to: http://eternallyoptimistic.com/2010/04/20/xauth-first-take/

XAuth seems to be nothing but a shared cookie, so it may not be a single point of failure. The RPs do not seem to communicate with the xauth.org so it should not be a critical problem even if the server was failing. At the very worst, the RP has to show all the NASCAR icons. That is all.

At the same time, it would have an interesting (not fun) security implications on a shared computer, but I have not done the analysis yet.

And right, I feel that it is taking user out of the cycle as well. It would have been much better if it just points to the location of the user’s XRD/s that lists all the services that a user can edit, but that may be way too esoteric. I agree that it is not user centric. It is service centric in philosophy, but that may be what the user is asking as a priority: “ease of use”. “