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Facebook Product Director Blake Ross temporarily kicked off Google+

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Blake Ross, Facebook’s product director, says he’s been booted from Google+ for using his own name.

And Ross, who is also one of three co-founders of Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, isn’t the only one who has found himself on the losing end of Google+’s name game.

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For the last couple of weeks, Google+ users have been complaining about banishment from Google+ and all of their Google services (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar) after the tech giant deemed their account to be in violation of its ‘Community Standards.’

Many have been using fake names, which Google doesn’t allow, while others, such as William Shatner, were using their real names.

Being kicked out of Google+ and all other things Google online, so far, comes without a warning, as was the case with Ross.

Thursday, on Twitter, Ross said he tried to log in to Google+ and found a message from Google (which he took a screenshot of) that said, ‘after reviewing your profile, we determined that the name you provided violates our Community Standards. If you believe that your profile has been suspended in error, please provide us with additional information...and we will review your profile again.’

As noted by the blog ReadWriteWeb, Ross isn’t the only Blake Ross on Google+.

In his tweet, Ross said ‘Google+ banned me for having the audacity to be named Blake Ross? Are they just banning all FB’ers? I smell fear.’

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Google officials were unavailable for comment Thursday, but Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product on Google+, has admitted in the past that the fledgling social network’s process for dealing with verifying that people are who they say they are ‘can be frustrating and disappointing.’

Google+ has seen tremendous growth, unlike Google’s previous attempts in social networking, hitting more than 25 million visitors in less than a month. But blindsiding users this way won’t help build goodwill and actually does the opposite.

Facebook, meanwhile, has a similar policy against using fake names on its social network, while others such as Twitter don’t have an anti-anonymity policy.

[Updated 5:25 p.m.: A Google spokeswoman said in an email that the company doesn’t ‘comment on individual profiles.’

Also, it appears that Blake Ross’ Google+ profile page is back up and the mix-up must have been resloved. It also appears that he doesn’t use the social networking service too much. As of Thursday afternoon, his last public update was July 4.]

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Images, from top: A screenshot of a tweet from Blake Ross, Facebook product director, about getting kicked out of Google+ (credit: Blake Ross via Twitter); screenshot of the message Ross says he found when trying to log in on Google+ (Blake Ross via Twitter/Google).

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