Google Granted Pseudonym Patent (You?re Welcome. And, What Is Wrong With You)

This week Google was granted a patent for "Social computing personas for protecting identity in online social interactions"; in other words, "a pseudonym could be presented as someone?s name based upon their choices of who would see that name or their 'real' name." Sound familiar? It does to me. Two months before the patent was filed, I wrote here "Suppose Google ... let Plus users define which of their Circles see their real names, while others can only see their nicknames?" I know, I know. You don't patent ideas, you patent implementations. I was interested enough to fight my way through the legal wording and try to work out what they're actually talking about. (Which was not easy, incidentally, even though I'm an experienced software engineer; patentese is incredibly hard to read.) There are a few nifty ideas in there: "one-time anonymous personae" and "a single persona with multiple users." Cool. But there's really no breathtaking insight or brilliant solution. The whole thing just seems like a very competent solution to the problem of online pseudonyms, one much like that which any other small group of good programmers would have designed. I don't mean to come down on Google. Their patent policies are much better than those of most tech companies. But I bet most Google engineers -- along with the overwhelming majority of software engineers in general -- would agree with the following statement in a heartbeat: most software patents are total bullshit.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ggdtUudNxZ8/

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