Finally! Google+ looses the real-name restriction policy

Google+ has been trying to be your main social hub for the past few years, with little success so far for various reasons. One of them was finally addressed today.

Google insisted that whoever uses Google+ must also use his/her real name, which was a rather idiotic policy between you and me. Apart from the obvious, like exposing people who had to use pseudonyms for various reasons, the policy draw criticism from security advocates as well. But it seems those days are gone, with Google officially dropping the policy as of today with a Google+ post:

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. 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.
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.
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. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.

I don’t know whether this will make Google+ more popular, but it’s definitely a step to the right direction.

Source: Google+