Solving The Scoble Problem In Social Networks

Google+’s structure – specifically circles – allows for solutions to this problem that would feel completely natural. Everyone who uses Google+ also uses circles, it’s not tacked on and optional.

Circles could become a powerful tool for filtering your stream (by, for example, allowing you to pick which circles appear in your stream by default) and it’s certainly also easy to imagine other options, e.g. the ability to disable notifications from certain circles.

At the moment all your circles are displayed by default and you can’t, for example, select more than one circle at once to filter your stream. It’s either all circles or one circle.

I can’t imagine that Google won’t add such options. The UI is a bit of a challenge – I’m certain they want to keep it simple and not add a few dozen checkboxes to the circles page – but certainly a solvable challenge. I’m not too worried about it but it’s certainly true that now is the time to complain about such shortcomings.

This is pretty easily solved with my current setup. I have a "Following" circle filled with prominent developers or tech celebs whose posts I find interesting. There are a few with the firehose problem, where either they post constantly or have way too many people commenting on their posts. When browsing G+, I typically just hang-out in my Friends, Family, or Acquaintances streams. If I comment on a firehose post and don't want to see notifications about it anymore, I just mute the post.

I could definitely see the advantage in them adding the ability to mute a circle from the master stream.

This is something that Google+ needs to deal with immediately. It's also a problem that Twitter faces.

Certain folks tend to dominate or flood my Twitter or Google+ stream - but muting/blocking/unfollowing them is not really an option.

From a usability point of view, it would be great to have a slider or a similar control that will allow me to tweak how often Person X's posts are displayed in my stream. Everyone in a Circle is not equally important.

Previous comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727454

tl;dr I really want to be able to mute people and/or entire circles. This won't "block" them; it just means that I won't have to see their messages unless they specifically target me.

If they do a decent API and don't go the twitter route, I can see some very interesting clients that allow a lot of muting and maybe a rules engine type construct. Twitter messed up by killing any innovation in smart clients, maybe Google will not repeat that problem.

// yeah, I had a side project of a rules based twitter client - oh well

Good points. Remineded me a lot of this recent article: http://jamieforrest.com/2010/07/01/notifications-unread-item...