Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about the Pages feature for creating a business-related page, which is something I was unaware of.
It seems like this could be expanded to be a general-purpose pseudonym system without too much trouble. Everybody who has a YouTube account who wanted to keep their YouTube name already has a pseudonymous Page, so the groundwork has been laid. Pages work a lot like normal Google Plus users, and seem to have a pretty thick layer of separation.
Also, Google has added a "nickname" spot in the Google Plus account, so John Smith could have his nickname of "Johnny B" and his pseudonymous pages WeirdSecretKink66 and RantingPoliticalIdentity23.
The biggest problem I see with using Pages for this is
(1) the UI sucks. The name even sucks for this context. Users don't realize this feature exists and even if they have it it's tricky to switch to a Page identity for leaving G+ comments.
(2) it's not supported across the whole Google ecosystem - you can't leave Play Store comments with a pseudonym.
(3) There's no way to ban Pages from your Plus threads. I should be able to say Real Names Only if I choose.
(4) There's no full-out "Anonymous Coward" zero-login approach. Obviously there's good reasons to avoid that feature, but if they want Plus comment-threads to be a truly general-purpose social layer for things like Blogger and YouTube and the Plus circles, then the people running the thread need to have the option to enable fully-anonymous comments in their own space.
It seems like this could be expanded to be a general-purpose pseudonym system without too much trouble. Everybody who has a YouTube account who wanted to keep their YouTube name already has a pseudonymous Page, so the groundwork has been laid. Pages work a lot like normal Google Plus users, and seem to have a pretty thick layer of separation.
Also, Google has added a "nickname" spot in the Google Plus account, so John Smith could have his nickname of "Johnny B" and his pseudonymous pages WeirdSecretKink66 and RantingPoliticalIdentity23.
The biggest problem I see with using Pages for this is
(1) the UI sucks. The name even sucks for this context. Users don't realize this feature exists and even if they have it it's tricky to switch to a Page identity for leaving G+ comments.
(2) it's not supported across the whole Google ecosystem - you can't leave Play Store comments with a pseudonym.
(3) There's no way to ban Pages from your Plus threads. I should be able to say Real Names Only if I choose.
(4) There's no full-out "Anonymous Coward" zero-login approach. Obviously there's good reasons to avoid that feature, but if they want Plus comment-threads to be a truly general-purpose social layer for things like Blogger and YouTube and the Plus circles, then the people running the thread need to have the option to enable fully-anonymous comments in their own space.