Facebook has, and has long had, a real name policy. If you want a reason why Facebook succeeded and G+ didn't, you'll need something that's actually different between them.
What you post on Facebook, however, is not visible to the public unless you explicitly make it so. There's a world of difference between what John Smith writes on his Facebook wall and is visible to only people whom John Smith has explicitly deemed to be friends of John Smith, vs. a public Youtube comment that was once authored by user LordofPants, but thanks to G+ real name policy is now known to the public world as John Smith.
Facebook was designed from the outset to be an online platform for your real-life friends. G+ should have been an online platform for your online friends, but then it mandated that all of your online friends must now need to know your real-life name.
On Google+ you have always been able to choose whether to share publicly or only to specific circles.
And the Youtube integration was also the immediate end of the real-name policy (which was really more an "no unusual name policy, because people got blocked for having an unusual real name, whereas plausible pseudonyms were left alone).
But you're right; it was a stupid policy, and they should have known that right from the start.
"a public Youtube comment that was once authored by user LordofPants, but thanks to G+ real name policy is now known to the public world as John Smith"
Are you saying the real-name policy was retroactive? I wasn't aware of that. If that was the case, wow.
G+ lost because Google forced G+ to every Google account. Post something to Youtube, you silently created a G+ post. Upload something to Picasa, you silently published the photo to your G+ newsfeed, etc. - quite toxic. And have they learned from their Google Buzz (G+ predecessor)? Nope, same behavior.
I have somewhat similar feeling about the upcoming Win10 launch, and in near future a lot normal user will learn the hard way why they got Win10 in exchange for the current Win7/8 license.
G+ wanted to be a rendezvous for all social/sharing activities on Google, and it turned out that many users didn't like it. Would G+ have fared better if it didn't force G+ onto every Google property? Maybe? It's easy to do armchair analysis, but hindsight is 20/20.
I don't think Win10 is that bad. In fact I think they fixed the MS account OOBE that was bad in Win8.1, making the option to use a local account much more clear.
G+ actively enforced this policy in a way that made people angry. When FB does similar things [1][2] people are similarly upset, but when they were going through early adoption they didn't force this.
They did, however, seed the community of initial users with real names by literally cherrypicking individuals at colleges from face books. So Facebook was always a place where it felt like one should be using one's real name, not "+X+ babyjoe23 +X+"
Keep in mind, Google already had experience with two social networks they owned. The Real Names policy probably didn't fall from the sky as an idea without merit; they might have had reason to believe that without enforcing real-world names, the resulting social network wouldn't get Facebook traction.
When I joined facebook, you had to use your university email address. There was zero expectation of not being linked to your identity. Perhaps Facebook broadened after that, but the Facebook culture was already established that you expect to see real people you know there.
Google instead tried to shoehorn existing users with a different culture. Perhaps they could have created a separate service with different expecteations and grown that, but they seemed to feel entitled to a create a short cut to success at their user's expense.
Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head here. Facebook began with an expectation around an account tied to a real-life identity, and Google didn't. Google totally mis-read the cultural implications of integrating G+ into existing Google products.
Facebook is a single-purpose social network. It stands alone. Plus is a social platform providing a glue-layer between all the social aspects of Google's services.
When you're providing a platform, you can't afford to be opinionated.
Facebook supports messaging, event calendars, photo and videos, blogs (Pages), business listings, geo checkins, a social app platform, and a web identity service....
How is that different in kind from what Google offers to consumers?
Google also offers binary blob data storage/sync, and a phone OS. Is that key?
Facebook offers all those things as part of Facebook.
Google offered a lot of totally unrelated things, from a phone OS to a video site, a search engine, and a social network which did incorporate some stuff on its own (hangouts and photos were well integrated and not really a problem as far as I can tell).
Suddenly introducing connections across all those different sites, so your mail contacts end up on your phone, your Youtube posts on Google+, and identities that you want to keep separate get merged against your will, that is stupid, harmful and a betrayal of their users.
It's not really to do with what the products are in a narrow technical sense, as to do with what the social context of their use is. After all, that's what makes a social network.
In particular, when people came to gmail in the first place, they were using it as an email service. When they came to youtube, it was as the world's largest collection of videos. They did not want these conflated.
You could list all those items for Yahoo and for AOL as well. But Youtube is distinctive in offering a huge collection of searchable videos. You name it, it's there, until it gets taken down by contentID or made unavailable in your country. Can you even search for videos on Facebook?
I have an `official' facebook account with my real names and everyone I know or wanted my facebook. I never post or look at it, everything is locked down.
And I have an `active' facebook account with a fake name and people I really want to `follow' or people I let in.
I think we European might care a bit more about our privacy. Just a bit, not that much more, but a bit. That way you're less "discoverable" by a complete stranger. I guess it's cultural. And I'm pretty sure that if FB tried to enforce real name in Europe they would loose quite a lot of accounts.
