Google Plus is open to the world now, some guestimate that there are over 10,000,000 accounts now… yes, 10 million! That’s a lot of people pretty fast and one could assume that it’ll only grow exponentially from there.

What’s more, with Google+, you don’t need to be friends with someone to add them to your list (in Google+’s case, a circle list). You can just find people, add them and presto, they’re in your news stream. The problem with this is that if you like a lot of tech people, celebrities, have lots of family and friends and also get some news through your feeds… well, it can start to get pretty noisy, pretty fast.

Circles to sort, Circles to filter

This is why you put people into circles in the first place, rather than just make them a friend. In this way, you can put all of those people into certain circles that you may want to read from more often than others.

You can make as many circles as you want too, so you don’t have to stop at “celebrities”. You can make circles such as “Celebs on Television” or “Celebs in Music” or what ever you want. You could even put “Celebs I read about every day”.

It’s actually important to do this kind of thing, even though it may end up making for a very large list of circles.

Where most people fail is where most people get overwhelmed

In my experience, from the people I’ve talked to, they feel overwhelmed quickly because when you visit Google+, you are on the “Stream” page by default. This page includes everyone that you have put into a circle. All of them!

Obviously, if you have 2,000 people in circles, or more, this can start to generate a lot of noise in your stream.

The key is to remember this:

This is your key to peace and tranquility. You’ve crated the circles, now use them. Click on the circle that you want to read from so that ONLY those people are displayed on the page.

If you have 20 family members but 2,000 people total… well, it makes sense to click on Family and filter out all the noise to see just what your family is up to.

It seems so simple, so basic but it is easily forgotten. And once you’re overwhelmed, there’s little to convince you to return and give it another try.

So once you’ve created your circles, use them… otherwise you’ll find very little value in them.