Here you are Wed7pm, -I know almost nothing about you. But that's not important. You are a person. In that sense, we have a lot of common ground. It's sad that Schmidt degrades this kind of interaction. It's really sad if he knows its value, and is doing it anyway.
But it does seem like there's a danger it will be pushed out of existence by sites like Facebook and Google+ (where it's who you are and who you know that matters, not what you think and what you say).
However, the whole Google+ kerfuffle seems blown way out of proportion. Does every site have to allow pseudonyms? Is it really the end of the Internet as we know it if one site requires real names?
Is anybody saying that? I think the main problem is that it's a Google site, not just any site, and not just a "site" either: it's endeavouring to be a social network and a platform. I'm not entirely sure what a platform is, by the way, but think it's the foundation on which other webdevs can build things. If so, it will set some initial standards or expectations which everybody else will need to adhere to if they want their apps to work with it. And something that Google's executive chairman Schmidt said the other day: they think the internet lacks "an accurate identity service". In the context of what he was saying, it seems that maybe Google+ is their way of building that. The transcript is in an Andy Carvin Google+ post if you're interested:
https://plus.google.com/117378076401635777570/posts/CjM2MPKo... Google isn't the entire internet, obviously, but it does have a big influence over what happens elsewhere.
... the notion of strong identity was never invented in the Internet. Many people worked on it - I worked on it as a scientist 20 years ago, and it’s a hard problem.
- from a Q&A at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival; transcript in Andy Carvin's Google+ post:
https://plus.google.com/117378076401635777570/posts/CjM2MPKo... What was he working on as a scientist 20 years ago?