[rbright]

Pretend like it's called the "Firehose" instead of the "Stream" and then add everyone who you find even mildly interesting. Then use the circle editor to create less noisy channels – e.g., "Friends" for people you know IRL and "Tech" for tech journalists/bloggers that you find particularly interesting, etc.

IMO, this is the best of all worlds. You always have fresh content in your Stream a la Twitter; open the "Friends" circle for Facebook; "Coworkers" for LinkedIn, "Tech" for industry news; etc. Lastly, mute posts that are becoming annoying.

Thanks to circles, the main Stream is not particularly valuable real estate that you need to protect. You can always create a new circle called "Stream Sans Scoble" and add everyone except Scoble. :)

[rjd]

Nope circles are a joke for me. I have venn diagram problem where lots of my friends belong circles in multiple circles.

Lots of them are in advertising agencies, journalists, musicians, all people that self promote themselves as a living. Hence all my streams are full of a mix of true spam and content that I might want to see.

TBH the weighting system of Facebook is MILES ahead of circles for me. Circles is still to primitive. I seem to get the stuff I care about on Facebook first, and if things are gathering steam it gets promoted to more front page. Seems like a much better noise filter.

So I closed my Google+ account down a few weeks ago. I agree with the grand-parent post its a Tumble clone. But I prefer Tumblr its got better original content (and I've already got a great list and lots of friends there that makes me bias).

[rwolf]

"I have venn diagram problem where lots of my friends belong circles in multiple circles."

I was wondering if you could talk about this a little more. My first reaction was "But... but you can add people to multiple circles!", but I think that I've misunderstood what you mean by "venn diagram problem."

edit: I don't have any delusions about luring you back to a service you dislike with Impeccable Logic. I would like to better understand your reasons for signing off.

[rjd]

OK heres ones example. I have a good friend who is a dance music promoter. He throws shows once or twice a week, and big ones every month. He posts like crazy.

He is one friend, I have at a guess around 30 people involved in doing roughly just this. I have a friend who owns a dance music label, plus for the last year I have been working for a Television news network running there online news. I have lots of journalists and advertising people doing the same thing.

And the problem is I'm a social person, I go to these dance parties. I know lots of musicians, these journos are my friends, and I go to advertising events and talk to people. I'm likeable and I like people, but the way social networks are used in my circle of friends is as much (if not more) for business as it is anything else. Its a promotion platform and they use it as such.

So theres a cross over point where my friends need there posts to be in separate circles, which they can do... but guess what... theres no benefit for them to do so. Infact there is a negative in terms of promotion in doing this behaviour.

Anyway back to point, if I isolate people into circles for say "promoters" then stuff that should be appearing under "friends" is appearing in the wrong circle and I would miss it (as I would only check the promotions tab approaching the weekend). Circles are black holes for crap you don't care about.

Which in itself wasn't a huge problem as only a few people where actually posting personal stuff. My feed was just advertising, "reasons why Google+ was better than Facebook", and gif's I'd already seen on Reddit a day before.

Lastly I also am known under a pseudonym due to years of involvement in the music scene, that was the nail in the coffin to me. And writing that just made me realise the root cause of my issue is just that fact. People are using there personal accounts to push business matters.

[uxp]

I think a lot of the problem with circle's being too complex and overlapping is a symptom of people posting public only (the blogging aspect).

For example, I follow Leo Laporte, who has recently been publicly posting a lot of HAM radio related updates. Amateur radio is interesting to myself, but its not a subject I'm all that interested in constantly be seeing. I don't have a way to really block that subject out as a whole without blocking/unfollowing him as a whole, even though I find most everything else he posts to be interesting.

If Leo Laporte had a way to know what interests I am into, and then automagically not put me in a "Amateur radio enthusiasts" circle, of which he posts all those updates, then I would be happier for less noise on my stream. The problem though, is that he is doing it publicly, which means I get everything from him, since that is his choice to put it public.

So basically, I guess, we already have a way to filter outgoing messages by posting to specific circles, but I would like a way to "reverse circle" the people I follow so that I only receive public posts either under a whitelist or blacklist of keywords, which seems to be one of the only ways I see to "reduce the noise". We all know that whitelisting and blacklisting isn't the best solution to every problem, and this seems to be a very complex issue, so I doubt this idea would even work outright.

[rjd]

Yep exactly my problem, but the fact is currently there is no incentive for people who make a living off promotion to post to anything but public. Infact would generally be a negative.

It also becomes complex when people are friends and promoters as you can't block them.

[gbog]

I'm currently trying language circles (en, fr, zh), work not bad so far, and g+ should be able to do that automagically.

[ry0ohki]

I do use the circles, but unfortunately even when i stick people in the "talk to much circle" Google defaults to showing the full stream. And I can't pick "Show me everyone but this circle", so then I'm manually clicking the other 10 circles only to see that no one else is posting.

[jamesbritt]

The Plus Minus Chrome plug-in handles this, turning the list of circles into checkboxes so you can have default stream that is a subset of your total streams.

Of course, if you're not using Chrome ...