Facebook: Why Did We Do It?

We had written about this before, and had called it as the single most important reason for Facebook's success -

The question is this:

“How did Facebook convince us to use our real names on Facebook.com?”

If you put everything aside for a moment and think about this, you will realize that this is the single most important reason for Facebook’s success. Not the platform, not the scale, not the social graph. The social graph would not exist if we did not use our real names. (We got into some healthy discussions on that last point when we wrote about this earlier)

Before Facebook, we used to be pretty smart about ourselves online – we were jingoboy123, greenstone18 etc.

Why did we use our actual names on Facebook?