by Michael A. Romig / Austin, TX / September 20, 2011
A friend of mine last week posted the following to Google+:
I just looked at my G+ stream for the first time in 2 weeks. So far, not a Facebook killer.
He has 80 people in his circles.
I think his experience is that of many Google+ users. The big questions is "How do we find content that really resonates with what we like and turns us on?" Personally I am finding that mix and consequently love Google+. But currently the process is very organic and still requires a lot of manual effort. Today one can very quickly find people via circle sites like group.as or recommendedusers.com and with the amazing Circle+ chrome extensions seed your circles and streams rather quickly. I did this myself without the Circle+ extension initially, because it hadn't been written yet, and found great users. That and searching on findpeopleonplus.com my circles grew pretty rapidly. But it took a long time and effort. For example I like photography has a hobby and now I have 1679 photographers in that circle. Not surprisingly I get amazing content in that stream. Every single day I see things I wouldn't ever find on my own. Was it easy manually setting up a circle with that many people, absolutely not.
But with the volume comes the need for refinement and noise control. +Chris Robinson recently posted about plusclout.com to his public stream and he had a very insightful comment:
Imagine two new people opening a Google+ account. The first person circles 20 people with clout scores >60 and the second person circles people with clout scores <10. My guess is that the first person will have a great experience and recommend G+ to friends and the second person will go back to facebook.
I think Chris is right. The experience of each individual user is tightly correlated with what kind of content they are seeing in their stream. I was concerned initially that Plusclout was going to be more about volume than quality and wasn't sure if I saw much value in it. But as Chris dug into it, it appears the algorithm tracks comments and shares. On the day I had a score of 95 I posted a lot of content that had a relatively high interactive impact on people who saw the content in their stream. Those things kind of things should be an indicator of quality, in general.
Of course it doesn't address the specific issues of what content a user is posting and does that content really resonate with me or challenge me. For that you have to dig into their history and G+Me does an excellent job of quickly allowing people to investigate other users' posting history and even suggests a score.
Being a part of this limited field trial is fun. But it is also challenging. I think about the future and how today on a Google search we see many input factors affecting the search results such as browse type, geolocation, browser history and +1s. And how in the future Google's algorithms will probably help make intelligence quality recommendations for me based on my post history, +1s, sparks and browsing in the same way. But it will never be perfect.
At the end of the day it is personal. Some people come off too voluminous, whether they are or not. Others seem to repost content like a spammy machine and still have high circle counts. Some people just seem arrogant to me and others humble. My preferences and yours are still going to be highly subjective and that's where circle maintenance comes in. I enjoy looking at my incomming stream for this purpose. I see lots of interesting content from people I don't yet know, but are sharing to me. I love getting surprised and finding a new nugget and poster to follow.
Noise control is another topic altogether, but related. For most users I'll bet their streams aren't flowing out of control yet and getting more high quality and relevant content is going to be key.
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