Yeah, and unlike Facebook, Google was surprisingly bad at "real names". There were tons of stories about the people who either couldn't sing up - or even worse - got their accounts suspended and thus lost access to their email - because their name wasn't real enough for Google's taste.

FWIW, I've got an interesting name and FB insisted I send them a copy of my driver's license to open and account. Funny thing, since there are thousands of FB user's with that name. G+ didn't give me any such problem. So, "real name" isn't that much of a problem on G+, especially given the number of cats that have accounts.

For myself that convinced me immediately to kill my own "real name" account. I replaced it a few days later with a pseudonymous one (before pseudonymity was explicitly OK'd by Google many, many months later).

I agree fully that that one misstep put Google's home-turf advantage with the technorati early adoptors and poisoned the well. I don't think the company or platform ever recovered.

In conjunction with other moves by the company (culminated with forced YouTube-G+ integration which I've termed the Anschluss) cost me all faith and trust in the company. To the extent I can minimize my exposure to and use of it, I do.

The "Real Names" policy is actively harmful to the most vulnerable users, the ones the policy is purportedly supposed to protect. It does not eliminate online abuse, as there are enough trolls and troublemakers who have no issue with using their real names. It removes the most immediate defenses for those at-risk for bullying, abuse, etc. I know people who refuse to use the service because of this.

They've since partially relaxed this policy, mostly because it was never intended to protect people. It was pretty clearly intended to build Google's advertising database.