Mountain View, California — Relentlessly striving to outstrip its social rival Facebook that is routinely pushing out new updates to provide an enriched social networking experience for its users, now Google is ensuring that it does not remain left behind in the race has bestowed the folks on Google Plus with more options to control the flood gate of news feeds from their circles.
The new feature dubbed as “Sliders” fastened to the interface of the Google Plus page that lets users control as per their preference, how and when they want to see and share information from their Circles that may be clogging up their stream.
The new feature is somewhat similar to the ‘hide stories’ feature in Facebook which allows Facebook users to decide if they want to see all, most, most important, or no status updates from certain news feeds from their friends.
However, with similarities aside, this fresh release is aimed at better notifications and improving the signal-to-noise ratio on the budding social media hub. The new features are set to work on the “volume sliders” which Google added to its circles in December. What this means is that users will be able to choose which circles they receive notifications from and mute notifications from certain users entirely. However, the muted posts will still crop up in activity streams.
Google+’s new “Sliders” lets users control what they most want to see on the social network. (Credit: Google)
According to an official blog post, Google’s Austin Chang elaborates on a new Google+ feature that is meant to grant users with more control over what they read and share on the social network. He writes, “Last year we launched volume “sliders” to help you tune the posts in your main stream (http://goo.gl/wrHDD), and since then we have extended this feature across Google+. Today we are excited to roll out three related improvements that give you even more control over what you read and share”.
Here is how Chang from Google+’s team explained the new features in a blog post today:
- Whether its family members or epic bros, we have all got circles of friends whose content we do not 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.
- 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.
- 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.
However, the company said that Google+ launched volume “sliders” last year, extending it across the entire social network. What it is releasing today is even more specific ways users can control their Circles stream.
Finally, Chang mentioned that the “sliders” should be completely available to all users within the next couple of days. Also, these new controls come as the Google+ also recently announced that vanity URLs personalized to users’ accounts will be debuting on the social network in the near future.
Nevertheless, if you find Google Plus folks who deluge you with notifications, the new options would certainly help you mute their updates so that they can not clog your stream anymore!