Google+ Changes Name Policy

Google+ launched in 2011 and it wanted people to use their real names to "create a community made up of real people."

Now Google has decided that it excluded a lot of people who weren't interested in using real names, and have loosened its restrictions, according to a Google+ statement Monday. Instead, the social network allowed +Page owners to use any name and then "allowed" YouTube usernames to be integrated (although few users may feel the "allowed" was more of a badgering.) But now there are no more restrictions on 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 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.

In other words, Google received a lot of complaints and finally decided to quit fighting users. Now users just need Google to quit trying to force them to have one identity across Google properties and it might be OK.

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