I’ve been playing around a lot on Google Plus. It seems to offer the best features of StumbleUpon (find and share cool, useful, and interesting content on the web), Facebook (keep up with friends, relatives, and co-conspirators), and news aggregators (follow streams of text, pictures, and videos on trending topics as they emerge). So far, I like it a lot.
One thing I discovered is that some people and organizations I like to follow put out more content than I can keep up with. I don’t want to “block” these people, which would prevent their posts from showing up for me at all in my stream, I’d just like to throttle their input a little. There are also a few people whose content I really don’t want to see except when I’m in the mood, and don’t want to have to block / unblock them individually. One example is the number of authors on HubPages that I’m following but who are not following me in return.
A search in Google for how to do this turned up a lot of people asking for this functionality, and even a browser plug-in that lets you do this. The plug-in however is for Chrome, which isn’t my main browser (Opera is, in case you’re wondering).
It turns out that a few months ago, Google Plus added radio slide controls that let you determine how much or how little content produced by the members of each circle contribute to your home stream. Click on the picture for a larger view.
The other options, aside from “Show Nothing” from the selected circle, include “Show some posts,” “Show most posts,” and “Show every post.” I tested all of the various settings with each of my circles, and indeed, “Show nothing” does prevent posts from people in these circles from showing up in your stream, but you can always select these circles explicitly and see all of their posts.
The slider control doesn’t appear for me on my various portable devices – it looks like you have to set your preferences using a full desktop version of a browser. Once set however, the settings do take effect on portable devices running the G+ application.
You find the slider by clicking on your G+ “Home” button, then selecting a specific circle from the tabs, or from the “More” drop-down.




