Google has decided to phase out the “incoming” stream in Google+. While some people are upset, I’d venture to say that 99% of users don’t care.
In the time since I joined Google+ six months ago, I’ve been followed by quite a few people. While some of those are certainly great folks, there are also quite a few spammers in there. That’s the beauty of Google+ — like Twitter, I simply choose not to follow them and I can move on with my life. However, as a result, my “incoming” stream was pretty much useless.
Google’s official statement on it:
“We’ve also greatly improved our friend suggestion algorhithms. these changes all serve the same purpose that incoming originally did: connecting people. Based on your feedback and our user research, we learned that the “incoming” stream was a very confusing part of Google+. Not surprisingly, this feedback was reflected in very low usage of the “Incoming” stream compared to the rest of Google+, so we decided to remove it and simplify things.”
While I’m happy to see it go, it feels like there ought to be some way to still view that stream. Perhaps future changes to the search feature will allow that. In the meantime, the Google+ interface just got a little bit cleaner.
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“You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone”
The reason for removing this feature of not wanting to confuse new users is weak. There is no simple way to duplicate this function in search that I’ve yet found. So unless there are are other technical reasons Google hasn’t shared with us about the whys of this decision I think they will regret it.