Except if I want to see if Steve Yegge or Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or X has a twitter it is extremely difficult. In general you have to search on google for their personal website and hope that it mentions their twitter info on the page.
The situation is even worse for finding your friends if they have their username as Rogue7777; you can't sit down at a computer and determine if your friend has a hackernews or reddit account for example. That is fine for some communities where it is a feature that any random schmo can theoretically have the same visibility as Linus Torvalds, but that is the exact opposite of what Facebook, Twitter and Google+; you care foremost about who is saying it and want to listen to what specific people have to say, not hear what any random anonymous 13 year old thinks about copyright law.
The issue isnt "real names", its "name you are commonly known by", unfortunately that is an extremely difficult thing to determine by looking at usernames; in general people don't call their friends "texans for marijuana legalization" or "darth vader" in real life though.
Not all famous people will have a twitter account, but if they do, it'll probably be in the top few results.
Those people who want to use pseudonyms, and have less visibility, can do that too.
I do not think a social networking site itself needs to distinguish between famous people, ordinary people, and pseudonyms. Link popularity and user-generated status within the social networking site will do that, and search is pretty good at picking up on those cues.
If anything, perhaps G+ and twitter need [better] tools that enable the userbase to ensure that a "real" Steve Jobs account can be given more status (let's call it whuffie), but Google and Twitter themselves do not need to take it upon themselves to unilaterally declare one account or another as special or reserved. That way madness lies. It will stress out the companies who have to pay employees to vet accounts. It will stress out the companies when they get it wrong or get into disputes over well-known identities. It will stress out users when they see network effects being overridden by corporate administrative fiat.
That search only works if their actual twitter page says that name on it, which is probably true for celebrities but almost certainly not true for your friends.
> Those people who want to use pseudonyms, and have less visibility, can do that too.
I think the point is that most people do not even realize the impact that going by Rogue7777 instead of their real name has. The people who post on HN probably do understand the implications of it; if you meet some random dude at a bar or a conference he will simply not be able to add you on Google+. Reconnecting with people you wouldn't usually connect with in real life is one of the things on the very short list of legitimate advantages that social networks can provide, and that is lost if you don't use your real name.
Generally social networks' rise based on what they don't let people do. Twitter's character limit is an oft cited example; under exactly the same type of argument that you are making, why shouldn't they let people write any length they want? Allowing 5000 character tweets wouldn't prevent people from tweeting 100 characters if that is what they want to do. Why shouldn't I be able to change my font and put autoplay music on my facebook profile like I could on Facebook?
These types of restrictions (and real names) are centralized overriding of people's feature requests because the company thinks it knows better (and it actually does in the examples above). You are perfectly free to buy your own domain name and write anything you want in any font with any autoplaying music and any xbox-live-handle-esque juvenile pseudonym you want, but when you use another service you are gaining the advantages of rules being enforced on other people in exchange to submitting to those same rules yourself. Maybe you don't care about if people have a red font on a green background, but that would be a worse experience for most people. Maybe you don't care if your friend is signed on as "SmokeBluntzAndPoundVag", but that is a worse experience for most people, even excluding the fact it would be difficult to find your friend and any behavior differences about someone who is signed in with that username versus their actual name.
> That way madness lies. It will stress out the companies who have to pay employees to vet accounts. It will stress out the companies when they get it wrong or get into disputes over well-known identities.
I think this is a demonstrably incorrect assessment. Facebook does a good job keeping people to real names (including dispute resolution that involves sending an image of your license if you have a name that looks fake), and Twitter does a pretty good job with "validated accounts". I don't think it is too extreme of a burden for either company; noteworthy celebrities and people whose legal name is Optimus Prime are extreme minorities and are easily manually dealt with with a minimal team of people.
The situation is even worse for finding your friends if they have their username as Rogue7777; you can't sit down at a computer and determine if your friend has a hackernews or reddit account for example. That is fine for some communities where it is a feature that any random schmo can theoretically have the same visibility as Linus Torvalds, but that is the exact opposite of what Facebook, Twitter and Google+; you care foremost about who is saying it and want to listen to what specific people have to say, not hear what any random anonymous 13 year old thinks about copyright law.
The issue isnt "real names", its "name you are commonly known by", unfortunately that is an extremely difficult thing to determine by looking at usernames; in general people don't call their friends "texans for marijuana legalization" or "darth vader" in real life though.