One of the earliest feature requests of Google+ users was for an ability to define the default home stream / circle. Seems like the G+ team introduced this feature without publicity sometime over the holiday period (or maybe I missed all the publicity being away from the Internet for almost a fortnight).
I just discovered this feature a moment ago when browsing through some circle specific timeline. Google+ now allows users to define how many posts from any particular circle appear on their home timeline:
Click on the circle link in the left navigation bar to go to that circle’s stream. Once there, you get a slider on the top left of content section to define how many posts appear in the home timeline.
On that slider, Google+ offers 4 sets of options for each circle’s stream:
Glad to have some way of controlling the behaviour of my home stream. Now that it’s here, it’d be great if G+ provides this filtering function on user basis as well, along with the circle-basis it does now.
Now for a note of small concern – when you visit a circle’s page, you realise that the default setting for filtering is ‘Most Posts’, which means some posts may never appear on your home timeline (which is the only one most of us check). While this may be fine if a user knowingly chooses that option, but having it enabled by default means that users may never see certain posts on their timeline, without knowing it could happen.
This is similar to what Facebook regularly does, and is regularly criticised for by G+ users. Would be a pity if Google decided to go down that route without informing users first.