Google rolls out more controls for Google+ Circles, to cut out the noise in your stream

Google+ has a really great experience for its stream, it surfaces posts that are most active. In addition, there is a slider control to bring “hot news” into your main stream…or not.

Today, the Google+ team has announced that those slider controls will be rolling out for each and every one of your Circles. If your family is annoying you, just drop the slider. If someone is particularly talkative, simply mute them and they won’t come up in your main stream. This is a very unique feature that should make the entire social experience on Google more enjoyable.

Here’s what Austin Chang from the Google+ team had to say about it:

Today we’re excited to roll out three related improvements that give you even more control over what you read and share.

1) Whether it’s family members or epic bros, we’ve all got circles of friends whose content we don’t want to miss. By moving a circle’s slider all the way to the right, you can now get notified whenever they share something new.

2) For these select circles, we often have news we really want to share — like getting engaged, or landing a job. In these cases you can now check “Also send email” when sharing, to help make sure your friends see your message.

3) Finally, we all have a chatty Cathy (or Charles) in our circles. We still want to enjoy their posts in the stream, but we don’t want a notification every time they share with us. Now you can do exactly that: just click “Mute” from notifications or their profile.

The problem with other services that have a “stream” is that you have no granular controls over what comes up in that stream. You get into a situation where you don’t want to follow a lot of people because you simply can’t keep up. That’s unfortunate, because you miss out on a lot of great content and conversation.

Luckily, Google is thinking about this problem and this is a great step to solving it. These features should be available for everyone within the next two days.

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There’s a fine line when it comes to giving users control over what they see on a platform, but at the end of the day, happy users are the best ones to have.