Are Real Names Required For Real Socializing?
avc.com
avc.com
I don't know email addresses or commonly used online aliases for even 10% of the people whose names I know. I'm fairly confident that I could find just about any of my cousins or high-school classmates on facebook in minutes. Without them having put their real name on their facebook profile, I don't believe I would be able to find them at all. Surely it's clear how that leads to facebook having a much bigger network much faster than a service that doesn't use real names. Real names are the key my brain uses to identify people.
I also think there is a psychological impact of constantly looking at pages filled with names that you recognize. If you swapped out all the names on my facebook feed with random hn usernames, I think I would feel different while I read it.
All that said, I do agree with most of what Fred Wilson is saying. I hate the impulse to "civilize" or "sterilize" the web as well, and I'm especially concerned when politicians start with that sort of talk. Real names make sense only for facebook or a facebook replacement (good luck with that), because in my mind the definition of facebook is "the thing you use to communicate online with people you know in real life."
Heck, when I lived in California, everyone there called me by a short form of my internet nick at the time. Most people didn't know my real name, and the few who did still called me what everyone else called me. It didn't change anything. My boss even wrote my check out to that name once, with my real last name. I had to have him correct it.
I think some people are scared of things being different, and socializing on the web is vastly different than socializing in your home or a bar. This 'real names' thing is an attempt to hold on to a little bit of the socializing they are used to. It will pass.