Finally, Google+ won't force you to use your 'real-name'

Finally, Google+ users can use a name of their choice while mingling on the social networking site. Google has apologised and finally stopped requiring people to use their real names as it trying to gain ground on market leader Facebook.   The company also spoke about the restrictions it introduced when Google+ was launched over three years ago. And now it has slowly begun loosening the requirements with changes such as letting people use YouTube account names, but conceded that the names policy got a bit muddled.   In an  official Google+ post, it writes, “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.”   Last year, YouTube had changed the way comments are made on the website, soon followed by mandatory login to your Google+ profile in order to comment or like any video on the website. In our report, we had highlighted that ‘Google+ being integrated into the comments system eventually could turn out to be **highly irritating, making it unusable** and—to a small subset of users—even tyrannical.’   “When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile,” the California Internet titan said in a post at the social network. “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.”   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 apologise, and we hope that today’s change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be,” the post adds.