> And to put the elephant in the room to bed, Google didn’t need real names, they simply needed one common way to refer to individual people.

I don't think this is sufficient treatment of what was, at the time, the biggest objection to Google+ that I heard. The hamhanded forced real name thing killed Google+ for virtually everyone I knew on there, less for the actual concern about using your real name than for the attitude it displayed towards users' privacy.

I know I was well on the way to moving completely over to Google+ at the time they announced that change, and dropped it entirely almost immediately thereafter.