Now wait a second.

I am in a highly organized secret Facebook group mah-self. The thing is that this highly organized quality means that they could jump anywhere if they really wanted to. Perhaps you "semi-organized".

Basically, I think lock-in to any social networking pretty much has to come through a group disorganization, through the fact that a given setup works for some members of the group but these members are not so committed that they'd actually jump from one group to another.

But there are other factors, I think G+ only has traction with early adopters. By starting at Harvard, Facebook itself spread from high-social-prestige people to the rest of us. G+, for whatever reason, may be spreading the same way but that kind of effect only works with the tenuous connections you want to have with people who aren't wholly committed. The cohesive connection you with people in a set group don't require any given medium to happen.

Anyway, personally I'm not going to G+ due it's even-more-draconian-than-Facebook anonymity policy (Facebook's policy is pretty much that they only say they care).

Actually, G+ does support pseudonyms, although there are some subtleties with how they work and the approval process involved with them. See this very long thread for the details, and some really interesting discussion about names, pseudonyms, "core identities", "peripheral identies"/hats, "firewalled identies", and more:

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/YJbzDptWGQt

I don't think your statement accurately describes the text in your link.

The only thing I see here is the ability to add a nicknames - your "alternate names" - to your "real" name. That is not at all the same thing.

Edit: Comment on the page - "I'm sorry, but the only difference I see here is that you're now listing the nickname field on the hovercard and profile. I see no substantive policy change. Fame was already an obvious and hypocritical exception to the policy; now you're just open about it." That's what I read.

G+ totally allows pseudo names.

But that's not really a game changer. Whether you are at FB or G+, if you are using pseudo name to protect your identity, than you are rendering yourself useless because you can't be hiding and expect to be networking authentically with the people you know for real. What would make sense for FB/G+ to provide is the ability to have each person choose his/her self-identity based on different situations, i.e, provide complete autonomy to the people on how they wish to portray themselves to the different sets of people. I can be a real name in front of my family and co-workers, but at the same time, projecting and sharing different sets of updates based on who am I sharing with. At the same time, I can be a pseudo name in front of the strangers and/or people I may only know online.

Are you trying to make these identities to be firewalled from each other? i.e., do you not want your family to know that you go by "Master Dan" in certain BDSM communities? Or for someone who is transgener, but isn't yet ready to let a set of friends/family/coworkers know yet by the choice of a differently-gendered name?

It turns out this is extraordinarily difficult, and if users think they can maintain this separation using a single account, and then they get burned, they are very likely to blame the social network involved. Which is a pretty good reason why the architects at FB or G+ would probably think very, very carefully before implementing such a feature.

But isn't this how people live their life in the offline world?

G+ has the same policy as Facebook now: you must use a name that looks reasonably appealing for a marketing campaign, and nothing obviously not anyone's real name, nor excessively foreign looking.

Read through to the rest of the comments..... there is also the ability to use pseudonyms.

An organized group is surprisingly mobile (and can be fairly robust over time as well).

I've known a few groups which have survived / persisted across multiple platforms over the years. In one case, migrating first from one hosted forum to another, then self-hosting, then that imploded, a "temporary" forum was constructed (and persisted for years), and finally the original self-hosting platform was resurrected.

Bits of the group survived all of that.

What didn't survive were several members (death trumps all social stickyness), and some political and group-dynamics interactions, including a few fairly spectacular flame-outs. But a core element has survived.

If a group were, as a whole, to decide that FB was no longer where its interests were best served, then a migration elsewhere would be trivial to arrange. Despite my own interest in archives, it's not the depth of social media history that matters so much to most users as the breadth of now. Facebook is where "now" is for most people, though this could change (and has for all prior social network giants of the past: Geocities, Usenet, Orcutt, Xanga, The WELL, ...).

I discovered groups quite recently, and colour me surprised at the kind of stuff that goes in on some of them.

I joined this local car club group, and there's literally hundreds of people every day posting up pictures of their cars asking for... swaps. SWAPS?! This happens in the real world?!

On more investigation there's local groups like "Under $50"... to "Under $1000" - and my gods, they're soooo suspect.

I can understand why they're a big part of people's lives, because they've got a wealth of content!

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you said, but you piqued my interest. What do you mean by "suspect"? What are swaps? What is under $50? What kind of content do they have?

I think the implication was that a large degree of the products available were stolen and Facebook was being used as a method of finding buyers without leaving a paper trail.