As other posters have noted, many Chinese have the Chinese-lettered name eg "strong army", the pinyin version and if they move to a Western country they pick their own English name like "John" or something. In writing, Choi/Choy (and I think Chua and Chow) are the same. I will skip the philosophical discussion of what reality is to the viewer.
I don't understand the linking to a real name. Give everyone a private number, and then the user links whatever names they're known by to that number. When a searcher finds the name Skud and adds Skud, they will forever see Skud and whatever other names Skud has chosen to have visible to that circle. The link is the number, and the name is just a display.
I wonder how they would deal with a woman who changed her last name when she was married, and reverted to her old name after the divorce. And she's also an author writing under a pen name (like Stephen King/Richard Bachman/John Swithen).
It seems obvious to me but nobody's done it so there must be some unique flaw. Can any commenters enlighten me on why the unique private number idea is a bad one?
As Google+ has realized with circles, we have different associations we make in life.
Some of those are widely separate identities.
I see no reason why any identity I have on one site should be associated with one I have on another, if I deem that it not be.
For some purposes (voting, financial transactions, long-lived financial accounts such as SSI or a life insurance policy), you'd want to tie one identity to another. Beyond that, it's simply a control and surveillance front.
Even in the cases I've mentioned, weak authentication has long been the rule. Strong authentication in voting is often tied to poll taxes and other means of restricting the electorate. Public corporations (literally "anonymous societies" in French) are highly psuedonymous. Cash (and digital equivalents) are untraceable. And numbered bank accounts are the stuff of legend in both finance and noir literature.
Identity is a very, very deep, and frought, question. Curiously, G+ is turning into quite the discussion of it, from circles to gender to names to multiple identities.
One of the most classic instances of pseudonymity is among revolutionaries. It played a large role in the American Revolution, particularly among pamphleteers (the 18th century analog of bloggers): http://www.magic-city-news.com/Editor_s_Desk_34/A_Climate_of...
What of Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, George Sand, Ellery Queen, Frank Dixon, and Carolyn Keene?
A particular usage is among revolutionaries: Lenin, Stalin, Golda Neir, Moshe Dayan, Subcomandante Marcos, Carlos the Jackal.
Or stage names: Madonna, Lady Gaga, Huey Louis, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Bono, Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam.
You're making an extraordinary proposal. Support your position.
Oh sorry, I'm wasn't intentionally arguing against being pseudonymous. I was thinking of ways to manage the mutability, multi-mapped and non-uniqueness of common names behind the scenes. If circles can be kept separate, you could have a single login containing different circles for your pseudonyms. As an aside, I hate how current FB and G+ policy turns us non-celebrities into second class citizens. Disgusting.
Thanks to nradov above for info on HL7. Surely these major international orgs should already have been aware of it?
I don't understand the linking to a real name. Give everyone a private number, and then the user links whatever names they're known by to that number. When a searcher finds the name Skud and adds Skud, they will forever see Skud and whatever other names Skud has chosen to have visible to that circle. The link is the number, and the name is just a display. I wonder how they would deal with a woman who changed her last name when she was married, and reverted to her old name after the divorce. And she's also an author writing under a pen name (like Stephen King/Richard Bachman/John Swithen). It seems obvious to me but nobody's done it so there must be some unique flaw. Can any commenters enlighten me on why the unique private number idea is a bad one?