How to Set a Circle or Google+ User as The Default Stream

When you add friends to your Circles in Google+, you essentially ‘follow’ them, so that anything they write or share appear on your stream of updates. The Stream displays all updates from all people you follow sorted in chronological order. But sometimes you might not want that to happen.

Suppose, some of your friends are posting irrelevant stuff or sharing things you are not interested in, or say there is some interesting development at work and you want to keep track of what your coworkers are sharing in real time. Google+ doesn’t allow you to choose people to view updates from in your Stream. It does let you block a user, but that’s hardly a solution.

Here are two Chrome extensions that should fix this.

The first one is Golden View, and it can do more than just set a default Google+ Stream. Golden View allows you to:

• Mute posts from specific users
• Set a Circle as default instead of Stream
• Hide images from appearing the Stream
• Hide comments
• Search Google+ using Google Search

All options can be accessed from within Google+, nicely integrated with the interface. A separate options page allows you to specify which function you want to see on Google+.

Once Golden View is installed you will see a star next to each circle name. To set or unset a default stream, simply click on the star against the circle it appears. When a default is set, clicking on the Home button on Google+ will automatically redirect you to your chosen circle stream.

 

The ability to mute posts from a user is another handy function. This is different from the Block User option that Google+ has. Blocking a user completely removes the user’s updates from the stream, but muting a user simply collapses the updates from the user. You can still see that the muted user has posted an update, but the update appears hidden in your stream.

With Golden View, you can select a circle as your default Stream but you can’t select a user profile. This is possible with the Favorite G+ Stream extension for Chrome.

The second extension allows you to set both circles and individual users’ stream as the default stream in Google+. Favorite G+ Stream adds a single button to Chrome’s toolbar. A click on it opens a popup window where you can enter the URL of the circle or user profile you wish to set as the default stream.

The URL can be copied directly from the user’s Google+ profile. Circle URLs can be obtained from the list of circles in your profile page.

Do note, that you can’t use both extensions together. Golden View seems to override whatever default stream you set through the Favorite G+ Stream extension.