For me, the problem with G+ is that you can't fine-tune the signal:noise ratio enough.
In a nutshell, Facebook is a network of people I know first IRL, so getting pictures of their dinner last night or latest cat's antics and other useless stuff I can sort of live with, it goes with the territory.
But G+ is more like Twitter with longer posts - I follow a a lot of people I don't know IRL, but only because of a shared interest, and I'm only interested in their posts on that interest, not the other noise.
Whereas pointless posts on Twitter are only 140 characters, don't take up much screen real estate, and are easy to skim and/or skip, that's less the case with G+. I really want a way in G+ to filter out posts by those people that don't have anything to do with the shared interest.
For example, if I create a "Functional Programming" circle and subscribe to a bunch of Haskell, Ocaml, ML, Lisp, and Scheme programmers that I don't know IRL, I'm really not interested in their vacation photos and whatnot. But currently there's no way to filter their vacation photo posts from their posts on functional programming.
An effective 90% solution would be to simply add hash tag filtering to circles, so I can instruct my Functional Programming circle to only accept posts with #functional, #functionalprogramming, #haskell, #ocaml, #ml, #lisp, #scheme, and block anything else without at least one of those hash tags in it.
Not quite perfect, and G+'ers would have to develop the habbit of using hashtags more than they currently do, but it's functional and flexible enough and provides the tools necessary for the community to solve this problem themselves.
This is my biggest G+ pain point, and while I have nothing negative to say about the redesign (it's nice), as long as it doesn't solve this one problem, it will do nothing to get me using G+ more (I check in about 2 or 3 times a week currently).
I think you can click on a circle you're not interested in hearing from (they're listed on the right-hand side in the current/old UI) and there will be a slider at the top of the stream from that circle that will allow you to completely mute that circle.
Then I guess you can add your own "topic alerts" by simply doing a search for haskell, lisp, scheme or whatever at the top and then click "Save this Search" to permanently add it below the "What's hot" button on the right (I don't think there's a way to limit that search to one of your circled though... maybe there is I'm not sure).
EDIT: You can limit a search to all your circles, but not to individual circles. Then again it is unlikely that your "Gardening" circle will have much to say about #haskell.
I think G+ needs to clarify whether it's aimed at "only real friends" as Facebook is, or aimed at "mainly people you don't know" a la Twitter. Once they clarify that, people will stop posting vacation photos for strangers to see, or stop posting Lisp programming tips to their personal friends.
Isn't it the whole point of Circles that they don't have to clarify that? You're in complete control of who you send things to from the very beginning, and the only way you can add people is by putting them in the appropriate circle(s).
The whole thing is somewhat inside out. People should probably expose the things they are going to talk about and users decide what they want to hear from them. You could then make a topic protected or public. Protected would allow the broadcaster to accept / deny subscribers to that topic. Still too complicated but it would at least give people the control they think that circles provides but doesn't.
Yeah, people are sharing wrong. If one person posts Vacation photos, they should post it to their Friends circle, while their Tech posts can be public posts. But, to be honest it's one more thing for people to do and is the reason why there's no fine-tuning of noise.
No they are not sharing wrong, the system is broken.
Google+ offers many ways for me to target content to a group of people that I personally know, and only one, "Public", to distribute content to anyone who might be interested.
Unfortunately there are at least 3 common use cases that need to be considered:
1. I target a message to people I think are interested. (Google+ does this well.)
2. I broadcast a message to people who may be interested. (Google+ sucks at this.)
3. A group of people forms for some purpose (work, game, whatever), and needs to be able to communicate within that group. (Google+ has no support at all for this, and the result is that I was forced to go to Facebook to communicate with people I was playing a Google+ game with.)
There is a real need for all three modes, and I don't know of anyone who does all three well.
I agree that point 3 is still a very big omission. They must be trying hard to merge this "Group" feature into their Circles metaphor, and failing for some reason or other. I personally can't see how hard it could be to add special Circles which are shared by multiple people but managed by only a specific few, but I don't know anyone at Google working on G+.
"Whereas pointless posts on Twitter are only 140 characters, don't take up much screen real estate, and are easy to skim and/or skip, that's less the case with G+. I really want a way in G+ to filter out posts by those people that don't have anything to do with the shared interest."
The big/rich displaying of every link is as big of a problem as the filtering for me. After looking at the update, I appreciate how easy it is to ignore Facebook posts and thus quickly engage with the few posts I can in a given day. Just imagining my current Facebook news feed formatted like G+ is exhausting.
More fundamentally: I don't care to transact my private life on someone else's server (especially someone whose business model is based on mining that life for marketing and other undisclosed purposes).
My professional interests and certain hobbies: not such an issue. Though I see no reason to tie these to a hard and real identity. I managed fine for my first quarter century on the Internet without that.
Actually I want both. I don't want to hear about Lisp from some noob I don't know, I want to hear about it from Peter Norvig and the like. Need both people + topic/interest for that.
I agree, and a friend of mine actually had a working Chrome extension to support filtering by tags (implemented as hashtags, but transparently, so if you had the plugin it rendered the tags in a prettier way.)
Unfortunately his only takeaway from the experience was that designing extensions for chrome was really hard, and stuff kept breaking. He eventually gave up, IIRC.
Whoops, I got something important wrong there and the edit deadline has long passed: his takeaway was that writing extensions for Google+ was hard, not for chrome.
His complaint was the lack of a G+-specific DOM API, and how (at the time at least) Google kept changing things that broke everything.
If I could just set my "Friends" circle to be the default function of the Home button (something I've wanted dating back to my first 5 minutes using the service) I would probably actually use Google+.
"Home" being "EVERYTHING" is just a disaster. I want to see what the people I actually personally care about are up to first and foremost, and then I want to browse around to what the rest of the Internet is doing. Instead, everything is shoved down my throat all the time.
Not just that, but customizing the filtering tabs -- I get very rare G+ posts from my family, but still that tab lingers there, useless, while I'm forced to constantly peruse the drop-down to the right because oh no you can't add more than one custom circle to your tabs. Seriously, wtf.
No, I want a system based around both people and topics/interests. As I mentioned above, I don't want to hear about Lisp from some random folks I don't know, I want to read about it from Peter Norvig and other experts. Need to be able to cross-reference both people/posters (Circles) and topics (hashtag filtering or whatever).
I can actually get the pure topics/interest stuff from subreddits like /r/haskell and speciality sites like lamda-the-ultimate.org.
In a nutshell, Facebook is a network of people I know first IRL, so getting pictures of their dinner last night or latest cat's antics and other useless stuff I can sort of live with, it goes with the territory.
But G+ is more like Twitter with longer posts - I follow a a lot of people I don't know IRL, but only because of a shared interest, and I'm only interested in their posts on that interest, not the other noise.
Whereas pointless posts on Twitter are only 140 characters, don't take up much screen real estate, and are easy to skim and/or skip, that's less the case with G+. I really want a way in G+ to filter out posts by those people that don't have anything to do with the shared interest.
For example, if I create a "Functional Programming" circle and subscribe to a bunch of Haskell, Ocaml, ML, Lisp, and Scheme programmers that I don't know IRL, I'm really not interested in their vacation photos and whatnot. But currently there's no way to filter their vacation photo posts from their posts on functional programming.
An effective 90% solution would be to simply add hash tag filtering to circles, so I can instruct my Functional Programming circle to only accept posts with #functional, #functionalprogramming, #haskell, #ocaml, #ml, #lisp, #scheme, and block anything else without at least one of those hash tags in it.
Not quite perfect, and G+'ers would have to develop the habbit of using hashtags more than they currently do, but it's functional and flexible enough and provides the tools necessary for the community to solve this problem themselves.
This is my biggest G+ pain point, and while I have nothing negative to say about the redesign (it's nice), as long as it doesn't solve this one problem, it will do nothing to get me using G+ more (I check in about 2 or 3 times a week currently).