Google+ had its first major glitch on Saturday, and many users learned why Google is calling its slow, ongoing roll-out of the service a “field trial”. It seems even Google can run out of hard drive space, and Google+’s early high levels of activity surprised the search giant.
It seems that the disk that was tracking the notifications sent to users was full, and so for 80 minutes, the system kept resending every notification repeatedly. Google actually referred to the result as spam, which at least seems to indicate that they took the user complaints seriously. The fact that they fixed the problem so quickly certainly didn’t hurt user response either.
This incident only reaffirms for me the method I’ve been using to handle my Google+ notifications, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to share it with our readers.
I’ve never been a fan of having my email inbox fill up with every response to a comment I get on a social network, but Facebook has never really given me a great alternative. Google+, on the other hand, launched with a solution ready to go. Take a good look at your Google+ notification settings and the Google+ Android app. You can actually redirect every notification from your email to the app, allowing users to get notifications on the go without cluttering up their email every time someone adds them to a Circle. iOS users should have a similar capability soon, and anyone else can have those notifications sent to their phone by text message if they really prefer to keep their inbox Google+ free.
The desktop end of this solution is even simpler. The new information bar at the top of many Google pages includes an unread notification counter for Google+. I can open my Gmail and see how many notifications I have without getting a single email from Google+, so why keep them in the inbox anyway?
This setup may or may not have saved me from Saturday’s glitch. I know I didn’t experience the problem, but I may just not have gotten any notifications in the 80 minute window. If I ever do end up with an overwhelming flood of Google+ notifications, I know it’s a problem I can dismiss quickly from my phone’s notification bar, rather than sorting through a pile of emails.
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