…I’m late to the party. 
Just an hour or two after my rant on Blizzard’s Real ID, the company took a step back with a post on the WoW general discussion forums.
From the thread (the words of CEO Mike Morhaime):
We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.
Kudos to Blizzard for re-evaluating their stance. Usually it’s pretty hard to get a general sense of things from mere forum posts and blogs because of, again, the vocal minority phenomenon.
Now, obviously they do not want to completely back away from the idea. Further on in the post, Mike continues saying that the company would like to implement “powerful communications functionality” inside their games. This supports my stance that there is a much bigger, underlying motive to their actions. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like Facebook’s Beacon (resurrected as its Open Graph), Real ID will come back in a more sinister, hidden form.
Yeah. I’m not buying it either.
Gotta go – I need more tinfoil!
(Seriously though, this isn’t going away. They’re just calming the shitstorm to put out the PR inferno for now.)