Google is quickly finding out that it’s not easy being Facebook.

In the first real public drama centered on Google+, the search giant’s answer to Facebook’s phenomenally successful social network, Google nuked the accounts of dozens of companies that had set up profiles on the site — despite Google’s warning that only real people were currently allowed on the site.

Thursday’s whacking knocked a range of companies — from Ford to Sesame Street to Wired — off the service that now looks to have an estimated 20 million users. Google deactivate the companies’ profiles — though the Mashable blog, which had over 100,000 following its rogue Google+ profile, was allowed to switch ownership of the profile over to its founder Pete Cashmore. (That move prompted Techcrunch’s MG Siegler to pen a short, sharp, and profane denunciation of the transfer on his personal blog.)

Google’s Christian Oestlien says that the company is working quickly to create specific business profiles and will have them ready for everyone in the next few months, and has already had tens of thousands of applicants for its announced pilot of pages similar to the ones Facebook offers for businesses.

In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself.

That strategy isn’t sitting well with many — and prompted an open letter to Google from search guru Danny Sullivan — mainly because Google is forgetting a key lesson.

When you build a platform, people will use it in different ways than you expected and a smart platform adapts to accommodate them.

It’s unclear what Google’s goal is here. If the problem is that it’s computationally difficult to have an entity that has so many followers, then there’s no real explanation for why Mashable, one of the most popular profiles on Google+, was able to keep its profile simply by changing the name.

And if businesses, particularly media companies are encouraged to have someone represent their business under the person’s real name, as BoingBoing is doing with an intern, will Google let those profiles eventually transition to being a business page?

If so, what’s the point of the blocking businesses at the start? All Google is doing is rewarding businesses built off personalities — and punishing those that are not.

Google is likely trying to defer the difficult problems around trademark issues and fake business profiles, because any social network with scale ends up having to deal with the same thorny naming problems that plague the net (essentially inheriting all the problems of ICANN, though without the formalities).

But it’s not clear that this policy makes much sense.

In hindsight, Google probably knows it should have created a non-person profile page, but it’s compounding the troubles of that initial design decision by not refusing to let people use the platform as they see fit.

Yes, it could have gotten a bit messy, but the compromise is just as messy — and it’s left a bad taste in the mouths of some of its early adopters.

In three months, this issue might be quickly forgotten — but some version of it will return unless Google realizes that when you build a platform, you have to be willing to learn from your users and not just try to fit them all into the little circles you think they belong in.