Livre d'Or

Now, Dreamwidth does allow multiple accounts; invite codes mean a slightly raised barrier to entry, and hopefully prevents automated account creation. But maybe Google wants tighter controls than that. OK, so Google should insist on exactly one account per human being.

Something I hadn't thought of, but saw a comment about: where does that leave multiples? Perhaps "one account per person" might be more fair there, but even more difficult to enforce.

That's assuming that people might not want to separate, say, their dating life from their professional life in the first place - which some do now by using separate sites (what people put on OkCupid is probably different than what they put on LinkedIn).

Admittedly verifying names is not a simple problem; the obvious way is to use credit cards, but that excludes lots of potential users.

And isn't even foolproof; at least one person I know has a credit card in the name of her online identity (which started out as a Second Life persona but which she now also uses for things such as ordering books from Amazon or participating in Google+ with).

if I'm meeting up with people to go to the cinema, or inviting people to my house for drinks, I don't want to have to remember pseudonyms, I want to be able to do this using the names we regularly use for eachother.

That's assuming that the name you regularly use for someone else is not a pseudonym. You could call it a nickname, too.

Some people go on to turn their nicknames into their legal names simply because that *is* what everyone calls them (Chisel Wright is an example that springs to mind).

Others have some people who call them one thing and other people who call them another: if there were a DW meetup, I can imagine people calling you Liv, for example, if that's what they know you as, regardless of the fact that other people know you as something else. Or someone could be Charles to his family but Chuck to his friends - or he could be Tiger to his friends.

What Google+ won't be is a replacement for DW. Yes, it has "circles", and yes, the UI for sorting your social network into trust categories is quite a bit better than what we have here.

I was going to say that it has the "trust" bit of WTF circles but not the "watch" bit, but you probably can use your circles as reading filters as well.

What it lacks, though, is LJ-DW communities or FB groups: something where you can meet people interested in a given topic. Right now, you can follow people who tend to talk about that topic, but then you have to wade through posts about their recent trip to Corfu which you might not be interested in at all, you just want to hear about 12th-century Welsh manuscripts. (Or knitting. Or compilers. Or race cars. Or whatever.)