Time for the fake Lady Gagas to come out of the wood work. At a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and SVP of Social Business Vic Gundotra dropped the news that it’s okay to have “other forms of identity” on Google+.
Beyond that, they’re also getting branding pages ready, a long awaited-feature for many businesses. (Google+ kicked out Nike and Cola-Cola when the two companies tried initially.) Google was fairly strict in the beginning regarding its policy toward user names and brands, but it’s clear that the company is taking a chill pill when it comes to the matter.
(MORE: Google+’s Real-Name Policy: Identity vs. Anonymity)
Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management for Google+, says there was a reason for not allowing anonymity before: making sure they got other things, like the minor policy, in place before tackling the problem. “We have always intended to support [pseudonyms],” he noted at the All Thing D conference in Hong Kong.
Google also says Google+ will soon begin to integrate Google Apps, which is great for the companies who rely on it. It should be a reasonable assumption that this integration will occur as branding pages kick into effect.
(MORE: Google+: Google Reverses Its Social-Network Curse)
It was clear at the conference in Hong Kong how important curation was for Google’s social platform. Horowitz noted that the company was concerned about Google+ users and developers running amok, despite slowly relaxing its policies. “It’s not the Wild Wild West,” he said.