I've got like 10 people in my Friends circle on Google+ and my feed is literally flooded. I suppose I could do some filtering (although I doubt that is what a typical user would even attempt doing). It just seems like it's harder to find out "what's going on" than with Facebook.
Could you elaborate a bit more. Maybe we can gain some insights from your experience. i.e. Why is it harder to find out what is going on in Google+ as opposed to Facebook?
I'm not OP but I'm finding it hard to follow what's going on as well.
The primary reason is that my "following" circle is completely overwhelming my friends, family, etc, circles. I'd love to be able to look at all my circles except Following (or rather, to be able to view some subset of my circles at a time). Clicking to view "Family", scrolling down and reading, then back to the top and clicking "Friends", and then "Acquaintances" is tedious.
In addition, an option to view more condensed posts would be helpful for viewing my Following deluge. As it is, each post gets a few paragraphs and a handful of comments. This is often nice, but sometimes I'd like to scan it more quickly, and if it could be just the person who posted it and the first few sentences, I'd love it.
I seem to have developed a kind of bimodal distribution of contacts in Google plus that represent the extremes of Twitter and Facebook: a bunch of people I know really well (family), and a bunch of people I don't know at all (Vic Gundotra, etc). The problem is both groups are getting equal billing in the stream. Which means that right now anything my family members post is so far down in the stream I barely see it.
Another aspect of the same problem is a need for filtering on hash tags. Eg: I tried following Romain Guy because I'm interested in Android. But 9/10 posts he makes are about photography. I want to follow him but only see things he posts about Android. EDIT: thinking about it, there might be some useful cross pollination between this problem and sparks - it would almost solve my problem if I could just say "only show me things Romain Guy posts that are relevant to my sparks".
I feel like the two functionalities (twitter-like asymmetry, and facebook-like keeping track of your friends) are at odds. Either an option for all but "following" in the stream or else making the stream selection on the left as checkboxes instead of a radio group could really improve things.
Then uncheck the Following circle. Let me know if you have any problems with it. I'm in the process of making it work with multiple-accounts so if you have multiple accounts, it might not work.
Unfortunately, I've seen the same thing on my end. I've enjoyed using G+ far more than Facebook, but I think that it's going to be tough to pry enough people away from Facebook to make G+ work. Folks don't seem to want to maintain more than one Facebook-type account.
