Sheryl Sandberg

Vint Cerf, “father of the internet” and Google’s chief internet evangelist, is speaking out about Google’s decision to push users toward using their real names across services. In a recent interview with Reuters, the Google executive said the initiative to get users using their real names across profiles on various services such as Google+ and YouTube has “sparked intense debate” at the company:

Over the past year, the company has strongly encouraged users to merge their accounts on YouTube, Gmail and other Google properties into a single Google+ identity, the company’s social network offering that asks users to use the “common name” they are known by in the real world.

“Using real names is useful,” Cerf said. “But I don’t think it should be forced on people, and I don’t think we do.”

Vint said not using real names is “perfectly reasonable” in certain situations, especially in countries with governments seeking to ban anonymity:
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU6epAkC9wg]
It appears more than a few of the approximately 600 employees currently working at Twitter left the GooglePlex at some point to do so… 13 percent according to a report from AllThingsD.

Among the more notable of Twitter’s 87 ex-Googlers, CEO Dick Costolo, who had a short stint at Google after they purchased his FeedBurner startup, former Senior Product Manager at Google Satya Patel, and their recent acquisition former Products Counsel at the Plex and Head of Music partnerships at YouTube, Glenn Otis Brown.

While the majority of ex-Google employees seem to leave on good terms, one current Twitter staffer, creative director Doug Bowman, explained in a blog post entitled “Goodbye, Google” his frustrations with the working environment and reasons for leaving the company.

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