It’s no secret that Twinity is based on the real world. You can see it in our slogan, “Powered by real life,” in our virtual cities like Berlin, in our human avatars with face generation based on real-world photos, and from the fact that people always refer to Twinity as a “mirror world.”

Last year, we explained why we want you to be yourself, and we added privacy controls to make sure that you control your personal data. It seems that we are not the only ones, as MySpace has now moved in the same direction. And, as that post on TechCrunch notes, they are following the example of Facebook and others.

MySpace, Facebook and Google all want users to log in to third party sites using their account credentials from those sites, and having those accounts be associated with real names to do it is a competitive advantage.

Your name is a crucial part of your identity, and having access to your identity is a competitive advantage. And TechCrunch seems to think that this will be a trend.

I’d expect more of this over time, not less.