Google+ has sparked many online debates, but the one at the forefront concerns online anonymity. By forcing users to use their real names, Google+ has sprung open a worldwide discussion regarding how this affects activists. Google+ certainly isn’t the first social network to force users to use their full names, with Facebook doing the same long before Google+ ever launched, but the latter has been far more stringent in attempting to enforce the rule....

TheNew York Times Bucks blog reportsthat the web-only bankBankSimpleis going to launch next month in private beta. The invites should be rolled out slowly in the hundreds the company says. There are reportedly thousands of names on the waiting list to join BankSimple, which we’vewritten about before. Banksimple isn’t a standalone bank, in the traditional sense, but rather takes on the role of replacing your bank. It aims to make banking a different experience, getting rid of surprise fees while still making bill paying, budgeting and saving a priority....

Frito LayCanada has just launched an online campaign that asks Canadians to write the last 20 seconds of its new Doritos commercial, asking contestants to choose which flavour will remain in production. The commercial shows two scientists presenting two different Doritos flavours to a woman that looks as though she just stepped off the set from The Chronicles of Narnia. At the end of the unfinished video, she tells the scientists that “the lesser flavour must be destroyed”....

Online dating giant eHarmony has begun urging its users to change their passwords, after being alerted byKrebsOnSecurity.comto a potential security breach of customer information. Chris Russo, a security researcher, and Brian Krebs, author of the KrebsOnSecurity blog contacted eHarmony’s corporate offices to alert them of the potential exploit to the eHarmony database, where email addresses and passwords may have been compromised. However, Joseph Essas, chief technology officer at eHarmony, continues to deny it claiming, “Despite his reports to you, we have found no evidence to suggest that Russo has successfully compromised at the network level our corporate email and eHarmony site environments....

The past few weeks has put the attention of those of us in the tech world onto the evolution of social networks with the field test of Google+. We’ve been thinking about what it would take for Google to topple Facebook in this space: the immediate next steps in the social technology market. But making predictions further out than the near future requires us to define what the ultimate goal for social technology is, and that’s something that’s very hard to do....