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And perhaps the main reason why they are so successful.

People post with their real names instead of arcane nicknames from the 90ies.

With all the psychological and social results that follow.

Great point. I hope there's another way of getting rid of anonymity than having us all have Facebook accounts, because that is a great value. Having your real name and ties which connect back to your social life can hopefully be achieved somehow else... albeit probably through other sorts of centralized profile stores which might have the same stigmas as Facebook with some people. I think the key is in having many options for where you can have your profile kept and what level of data is there. As long as a profile provider's minimum level of profile data is sufficient to do away with the amount of anonymity that is necessary for a service (say Quora), it becomes a matter of how accurate the profile data is, i.e., how easy is it to create a fake account on the profile service?

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