Depends on your definition of close friends, and your definition of acquaintances. If acquaintances include the boyfriend of someone you somewhat knew in high school, then my use of a pseudonym that I had never used before worked for acquaintances while using facebook. What it didn't work for was people who simply had my name but didn't know any of my friends and/or were not specifically invited by me in facebook or real life to become my friend.

If you were looking for a guy who had my real name on facebook, you were out of luck. If you noticed one of your friends having a conversation with me, and asked who I was and knew me/recognized who I was due to the content of the conversation/recognized me as likely someone you might want to know based on your sampling of my adjacent nodes and my public content, you would have been able to find me.

>"There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by."

Not everybody wants to be discoverable in the same way. I may not want you to be able to find me just because you know my name. Maybe I want to avoid old one night stands/people I did drugs with/people I was in prison with/the obsessed schizophrenic who lives in my building and rely on my current network of friends and serendipity to populate my friend list.

I think the most important question is whether you are tolerant or intolerant towards that - noting that even if you do require real names, you won't be able to find mine anyway, because I won't be there. That question addressed to google or facebook is: "Are you still interested in me as a customer if you can't track me after I've left your system?"

If the answer if "No," you may not be evil, but you're certainly creepy.