"Some people are peeved that Google+ discourages you from participating pseudonymously. I don■t think a social network that wants to target the mainstream and wants to capture real-world relationships has any real choice about this."

I'm not going to argue for full-on bullet-proof pseudonyms, because I'm sure that would just be a matter of creating multiple accounts. The issue I have (and a wide variety of the "privacy conscious early adopters" using the system, I'm sure) is smaller: there's people I've been hanging out with online for the better part of a decade, and I know them by their pseudonyms. Google+ gives me a list of names I only barely recognise, instead of the familiar handles I've come to associate with these faces. Likewise, it would be nice if my user tile could show up in my parent's Circles with my given name, and my online friends' circles with my handle.

As another example, I have some friends of Chinese descent who have a "Chinese name" given to them by their parents, and an "English name" they use in non-Chinese-speaking contexts for the benefit of people who are inexperienced at pronouncing Chinese words. Their real-world relationships use very different names, but G+ forces them to pick only one.

A long-standing HN favourite post is patio11's "List of wrong assumptions programmers make about names", and one of the items on that list is "A person has exactly one name that they go by". This is exactly the assumption that Google+ makes, and it's just as wrong as ever. Circles is a great model for real human networks, but it doesn't go far enough: a single person can quite legitimately be known by different names in different social contexts.

As for myself, I've changed my Google Profile's "name" field to reflect my usual psuedonym, because more than half of my current G+ contacts know me that way. But I'll keep complaining about it, because I think it's an important part of human society that is being overlooked.

"Another reason why Google+ competes with distributed social networks: for people worried about the social networking service provider (or the Government) reading their posts, client-side encryption on top of Google+ could work. The Circles feature is exactly what is needed to make encrypted posts viable, because you can make a circle of those who are using a compatible encryption/decryption plugin. At least a half-dozen such plugins have been created over the years (examples: 1, 2), but it doesn’t make much sense to use these over Facebook or Twitter. Once the Google+ developer API rolls out, I’m sure we’ll see yet another avatar of the encrypted status message idea, and perhaps the the n-th time will be the charm."

I really like this idea. I hope they even implement it themselves so you can encrypt the data yourself on certain circles.

I also agree that Google+ so far seems that it could threaten not just Facebook, but also Twitter and Linkedin and maybe even personal blogging (Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, and Wordpress to a lesser degree)

It could become a publisher platform too if they create a good way to monetize the content without being spammy. Chris Brogan suggested affiliate links. I was also thinking they could allow you yo use your own Adsense id on the page of the post.

But they should think all these things through before they implement them. Oh, and I'm STILL waiting for content search within Google+, the way Twitter search works.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all those started life as experiments and evolved to become what they have today. Google+ is the first product I’ve seen that is designed and implemented in the acknowledgement of the outcomes of those experiments, having made some mature decisions about what it is people actually want from social networking. I feel like the web is finally starting to grow up.

Arvind, I had JUST published a blog post on this very topic, though not nearly as articulate or in-depth, when I saw this. All very well said indeed, and agree on all fronts.

I think all can agree that Circles is a great technology; the struggle for Google is going to be 1. convincing most of the world that there is an alternative to the all-or-nothing default of Facebook, and 2. that it is good. Great write-up.

Nice insights Arvind, check out http://secretsocial.com it is right up your privacy and identity alley!