Too Much Noise on Google Plus? Here is How I Deal With It - Stay N Alive

Too Much Noise on Google Plus? Here is How I Deal With It

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A lot of people are complaining that power users such as myself and Robert Scoble and others are causing too much noise in their stream. Scoble’s wife even quit the service because of it (and I can’t even convince my wife to use it even though I created an account for her). It’s nothing new, though – this is a problem Friendfeed had when they first released their real-time stream (Just Google “friendfeed noise” to see what I mean). However, there are ways of managing it. I’d like to share some of the ways I deal with the noise.

To start, let’s cover what generally causes the noise:

  1. It’s not necessarily about how many people you follow. Scoble follows thousands. I follow several hundred more personal contacts. However, as long as you don’t use the main stream as much, the number you follow really doesn’t matter. What matters is who you interact with.
  2. It is about how many conversations and what types of conversations you interact with. For instance, if you comment on one of my posts, you’ll get notifications for every comment on that conversation. On my posts, and people like Robert Scoble or Chris Pirillo or others, that will be a lot of notifications!
So, how do you fix this problem? At the moment Google+ doesn’t have a whole lot of noise filtering options for people. In some ways that’s why it’s growing so fast. It’s in your face, and forces you to interact. At the same time that’s pretty overwhelming for many people. Friendfeed overcame much of this by creating a pause button, and causing the stream to pause when you moused over it. They also collapsed many of the longer comment streams (Facebook does this too) so that only the first or last comment appeared. I imagine Google+ will do this in the near future. I don’t doubt they’ll find a solution. However, until that happens here is how I deal with it:
  1. Turn on your email notifications and ignore the big red circle. The first thing I did when I joined Google+ was turn off the email notifications because they were becoming too overwhelming (you can do this with the little gear icon in the upper-right of Google Plus). It turned out I found myself becoming too obsessed with how many things were happening in my stream, and it kept reminding me on every Google product I participated in. So I turned them back on, but with one caveat:
  2. Uncheck “Email” for “Comments on a post after I comment on it”. I leave every other email option checked. If you leave this checked, when you comment on one of my posts or one of Robert Scoble’s posts you’ll very quickly be overwhelmed by email. Not even I can handle that! The other options can be managed though, and won’t be nearly as frequent. If someone in one of those threads wants your attention, they’ll mention you with a “+your name” and you’ll still get an email (this is because “mentions me in a post” is still checked in your settings).
  3. Use Gmail. Gmail provides some great management tools for managing noise. First of all, you have priority inbox which you can train to not mark Google Plus posts as priority. You can create filters to send them to another label and skip the inbox if you like, and you can just skip over your notifications as you have time. And the best part about Gmail? Grouped conversations! Me personally – I like the notifications so I keep them in my inbox. Here’s what I do further though to manage that type of flow:
  4. Mute. Mute. Mute! When you’re in Gmail, just press “m” on your keyboard when you have a Google+ thread open, you’ll never see that thread again appear in your inbox. If you want it to appear again, just search for it and press “m” again and it will turn on the new messages to your inbox again. You don’t lose any messages this way. They just skip your inbox so you don’t have to pay attention to them any more. Also, in your Google Plus stream, if there’s a long stream that’s bugging you, you can just click the small triangle in the upper-right of the thread and select “Mute this post”. The post will no longer appear in your stream – no one ever knows you muted it.
This method has worked really well for me so far. It’s the same method I use on Friendfeed to manage my stream mostly. Please let me know how it works for you, or if you have any better ways of managing the noise in your stream better. You can do so in the comments below:
As always, you can follow me on Google+ at https://plus.google.com/107833107845497630206.

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18 thoughts on “Too Much Noise on Google Plus? Here is How I Deal With It

  1. Very good advice Jesse.  I want to know how the sparks feature will assist in reducing noise once the API is released and many plussers will auto generate/import feeds into g+ via RSS

  2. I'm not sure – I prefer Google Reader to Sparks, as I don't miss anything
    that way and I can be very specific in what I subscribe to. I'm not sure
    Google Plus is the place for that. I'm sure it will have value for some
    people though.

  3. Just to play devils advocate .

    You say you are contributing the torrent of posts in the public stream.

    Could you not …

    A Turn the volume down .. many of us think 'Is this really useful' before posting

    B Create a 'My Followers' circle and post the majority of your posts there , thus not polluting the main stream.

    Seems to me that if the few people creating the problem have a rethink , then the majority will not have to undertake the onerous steps you describe

    Just my 2c

  4. Luckily few people have your problem…

    Because the vast majority of people don't have access to Google+.  

    They should call it Refresh+.

    I've refreshed plus.google.com 30+ at various times over the last 5 days.

  5. If you make the mistake of adding a Pirillo or Scoble: good luck trying to knock them out of your feed completely. The inability to remove undesirables sucks. 

  6. Isn't circles that feature to cut down the noise in the main stream? For me it is the circles I follow and not the main stream. There is a circle exactly for people like Chris and Robert and you who have lots and lots of followers and whose posts are commented a lot on.

  7. Promoting google+ votes is becoming a very hot business. Using these types of services could have negative or positive affects on SEO. 
    We just have to see how google treats them. Another place to buy google plus votes is bulkones.com  
    Will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next few months.

  8. we see google+ votes is one of the top social stuff but here is also many site like that gplusvotes.com now its time to see their activities and how much they will satisfy us with their performance. will come here to see your reply, thanks.

  9. The new facebook layout and add-ons creates confusion to its users. Google+ may have marketed it well enough to offer such glimmering hope to these annoyed Facebook users.

    private label seo

  10. Today in every website google plus votes is used.It is increasing their popularity day by day.If you want anything about google+ here I am showing a way to find google+ related blogs,article,forums etc.

    The best google+ search engine to search on google plus is http://www.pluserize.com 

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