14 DAY TRIAL // While the 'real name' debate in Google+ continues, a bit surprising perhaps since Google+ is by no way doing something new here, it's the way Facebook has worked since the beginning, the social network has started verifying accounts, via some esoteric means.
Just like Twitter's 'Verified Accounts,' Google+ now has 'Verified Names.' Considering the many similarities between Twitter and Google+, it could be argued that Google was inspired by Twitter almost as much as by Facebook, the move seems rather obvious.
Google+ started adding the 'verified name' badge to some high-profile accounts over the weekend and, by now, it seems that most of the who's who of Google+ have a subtle checkmark next to their names, which indicates that the account has been verified.
There's no clear indication on how Google+ is verifying the accounts. For most relatively famous users, this is easy, for example, they have already built a reputation or confirmed that this is their accounts via other places, for example their official Twitter accounts, the blogs they write for and so on.
For Google employees, the process is again obvious. Overall, Google has the same approach that Twitter had initially, which was to manually verify the accounts, using common sense or phoning the right people.
It works for celebrities, popular bloggers or people known in the industry, but it's not a solution that scales. Then again, neither Twitter's 'verified accounts' or Google+'s new 'verified names' were probably intended for the masses, it's a way of knowing that the profile you're looking at is genuine for people that have a big chance of being impersonated.
But the move didn't sit well with the growing and vocal crowd asking Google to reconsider its 'real names' policy, which requires users to provide real names on their profiles, where 'real' is rather vaguely defined, as it's seen as a move exactly in the opposite direction of what they're asking for.