Pending -- Noise controlRobert Scoble originally shared this post:
First world problems thanks to Google+
Overnight my comment area was overrun by hundreds of lame comments. I took a screen shot of just some of them. It took me more than 10 minutes to delete all of these comments. Time that I would rather have spent playing with my kids or getting up another video. This is yet another example of where Facebook is beating Google+ big time: noise controls.
Facebook had this same problem but solved it by blocking folks from posting these kind of short, non-sensical, non-English comments. Facebook also makes it easier to delete crap from your communities (deleting a comment there is one click, here it's two clicks with a mouse move in between). Facebook also, because it has a better social graph, let me change the commenting ability of followers to "friends of friends."
But this gets me back to something I asked +Vic Gundotra +Bradley Horowitz and +Louis Gray for from day one: better noise controls. So far Google+ has been here a year and we've barely gotten any noise controls. Let's dive into what we still need, and what I hope we see at the Google IO conference:
1. Google+ is still suggesting people for me to follow that have never posted in public. That's extremely lame. Come on, how hard is this to fix? Why won't Google+ suggest people who I might actually be interested in? Facebook does this 100x better.
2. Google+ doesn't let us easily delete and block mass numbers of commenters.
3. Google+, every day, brings me content I really don't care about. Let's say there's a post about Justin Beiber. I can't tell the system not to bring me more items like that. Over on Facebook, though, my inbound noise keeps going down (the feed algorithms there learn from my reading behavior and bring me fewer and fewer items like that every day).
4. Google+ doesn't let me block certain comment types. For instance, I can't block animated GIFs. Over on Facebook I can block quite a few media types. I can tell the feed not to bring me photos, or videos, or to block all tweets.
5. Google+ doesn't let me granularly set noise PER PERSON. Let's say I only get value out of one out of 10 of Vic's posts, but I get value out of nine out of 10 of Louis's. I can't "turn down" Vic and "turn up" Louis (unless I build a million circles, since Google+ does let me set noisiness levels by circle. On Facebook the noise level is by person, which is far far better and keeps me from building convoluted lists, er, circles.
6. Facebook isn't very advanced and doesn't serve the advanced user well. For instance, I'd love to tell it "don't show me any item about Obama or Romney unless it gets 100 likes or more." Google+ has a chance to really innovate for users here, but only a small chance because Facebook's automatic noise controls actually are pretty good if you put time into setting up Facebook right (by marking each person as "close friend" or "acquaintance.")
I really hope that Google+ gets real noise controls before it turns on an API. Imagine if everyone were able to shove their Foursquare or Instagram stuff in here. (Over on Facebook, by the way, you can block those two things from your feeds).
Yes, this is a first world problem, it's probably not a problem that most users will hit, but I sure am and I'm looking to Google for some answers here. If none come, I'm afraid I will have to block most of you from commenting because I simply can't afford to take 15 minutes per post out of my life just to delete comments.

http://bit.ly/Lvr56e vía http://bit.ly/IoruUb