I have been using Google+ since it was first offered to the general public back in late June 2011. At times the service has had its problems so I put up with it thinking that Google would improve the service. I submitted numerous bug reports regarding problems that I saw and suggestions on how to improve the service. At times though it seemed that Google was taking the “throw it against the fridge and see if it sticks” approach to see if a change was well accepted by the end users.
Lately though I have sensed my frustration level with the service at an all time high. I use Google+ through the web interface even though I have an iPad and have tried the service on an Android tablet. In my view the web interface has short comings which are not present in either the iOS nor Android implementations. This is with respect to animated gifs, auto awesome and video clips. I find these extremely distracting especially if one has to scroll up and down several times looking for new posts (more on new posts later). On the web interface there are animations in all three of these types of files and no way of preventing the continuous looping from stopping. The only method is to mute the post which hides it and any posts from your main stream. With the Android and the iOS implementation these files do not loop continuously but only play the animation when one clicks on the play button. I have tried numerous extensions that purport to solve this continuous looping but have only found that these extensions do not work at all or they cause problems with displaying web pages.
Then there is a problem with Google’s sort algorithm. Unlike some other social networking sites i.e. Twitter, which strictly show you posts in chronological order with newest posts on top, Some third party apps for say Twitter have a means of keeping track of the last read Tweet so that you can always determine where you left off. Within the last week Google only implemented a bookmark feature that will mark your place but ONLY if you receive a notification that there are new posts available. This bookmark is not like the Twitter third party apps that can carry over the location in your Twitter feed between sessions. This means that one has no concrete way of marking the old posts from the new posts. I had to rely on scrolling down my main stream and stop when I started seeing posts that I had already seen.
In Google+ I had noticed on occasion that fairly new posts would disappear off my main stream and I have to scroll down for several pages to find these posts. Sometimes these posts simply disappeared and the only way of finding them was to go into the circle in which the posted was in my Google+ and find the posts there. I have all of my circles set to the standard amount of posts in my main stream.
In addition to posts disappearing from my main stream I have seen the sorting of posts go berserk. Where posts from several hours ago i.e. 12 hours would for some reason percolate up to the top of my main stream. These posts did not have comments that were recent so there was not reason for these old posts to show up.
I have also found that there is a problem with the Google+ Home button in that it has on numerous times showed me a version of my main stream that is several hours old. This requires me to use Chrome’s page reload button to force the page to reload the stream. Clearing the cache in Chrome did not seem to have any effect on this problem.
The problems with posts disappearing, old posts percolating up to the top and the main stream not being displayed properly resulted in much frustration on my part since I was unsure if I was missing new posts that for some reason where being shoved well below older posts.
There were other less major things with Google+ that I had sent in for suggestions on how to improve Google+ but those did not impinge on using Google+ like the above mentioned problems.
I found that my frustration with Google+ was getting to me so much so that for the month of September I have decided to not use Google+ at all. At the end of September I will re evaluate Google+. The options are to try using Google+, continue to not use Google+ or to cancel my Google+ account outright and remove all my posts.
Update:
Well it certainly was less stressful with dealing with Google+ weirdness for 30 days. People have offered suggestions on how to work around Google+ apparent bugs in displaying posts in the proper order. These suggestions included reading each circle’s posts rather than scrolling through your main stream. To me this seems to be a bit like putting the cart before the horse approach. This is especially true when one can be following hundreds of people in 20 or 30 circles and having to rotate through these circles only to see if there are new posts.
If Google+ has a problem with displaying posts in your main stream properly then the problem should be fixed. The end users should not have to try to find a work around. Especially when the problem has been an on going problem.
I am back to using Google+ but my usage of it has been reduced. I no longer have Google+ open in a tab in my browser all day. I have relegated it to checking it twice a day only and hopefully seeing most of the new posts.