New Google+ features: Customize your streams, and more

Touted in Google’s official blog today, the enhancements are part of an ongoing effort to make Google+ more effective and more user friendly.

One of the tweaks will let you customize your Google+ stream. The more people you follow, the more cluttered your stream can become, increasing the odds of missing important posts. To help unclutter your stream, a slider at the top of a particular circle will let you control how posts from that circle should mesh into the overall stream.

The red notifications button at the top of your Google+ page tells you how many notifications are in the queue. But sometimes you need to click on a specific notification to get the full scoop on it. To reduce the time you spend clicking around, Google is adding “sneak previews” that quickly clue you in on what’s new among your notifications.

Next on Santa’s list for Google+ members are a range of changes to Google+ Pages. Since launching the business-oriented feature in early November, Google has been striving to improve it amidst some users complaints.

Tapping into one of the improvements to Pages, you’ll be able to delegate up to 50 different managers to act as administrators for a certain page. A new “notification flow” will alert the managers to all activity on the page, ensuring that they stay abreast of the latest updates. And Google will show you a combined count of all the users who follow your page or +1 it, so that you can get a better sense of everyone who’s connecting with it.

Finally, Google is tweaking its Google+ Photos feature. Clicking on a photo will display it in the Lightbox viewer, but now with better navigation and usability. A new photo tagging feature will let you more quickly tag individual people.

Google says that the new tweaks to Google+ will roll out over the next couple of days, just in time for the holidays. And the company is promising more in store for Google+ members with some resolutions for 2012.

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