Wow. I've been letting a lot of well-thought-out pieces on the nymwars pass by uncommented here because they don't really add any new information to the things I've already seen and linked to before, but this one is new: Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Google+ is not a social network but an "identity service". Also doesn't come out and say it explicitly but strongly hints by juxtaposition of sentences that he thinks people who might want to use non-government-approved names (such as: your kids, if you have any sense as a parent) are outright evil and should be blacklisted from the net.

Some advice for Eric: when you're in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging. So far, the pseudonym issue (and the threat that signing up for Google+ and then running into their name enforcement issues could block access to other services, even for people using official but non-WASPy names) seems to have acted mainly as a weight holding back the momentum for Google+ just when they needed it to build, and making it more likely for it to meet the fate of Knol, Wave, Buzz, etc. But this sort of statement has the potential to spread the mistrust of Google's handling of personal information far beyond G+, to Google's other healthier services as well. Who do you want to service your identity today?