Google Plus Suggested User List Released: A Page With List of Famous People You Can Follow on Google+


Google plus as we all know is still in field trial mode and not yet launched for public signup. As of this writing, signup’s are only through google+ invites from other google+ users.

With that said, let’s say you got an invite from your friend or through Google-Plus.com and joined google plus. Now if you are lucky with your friends are already on google+, then you should be able to create a friends circle, add them to the circles and immediately start seeing their posts through the stream view on the main page of google+. But since it’s not yet opened for the public, there is no way you can start following your friends, family or anyone for that matter. The result is, you’ll end up with a blank page or ghost town with no post or content coming in which won’t be a pleasant experience either.

To make newbies life easier, google+ has launched a new page called Google’s Suggested User List. This is a list of early adopters of google+ and who are most active users & also share a large amount of content since the google plus launch 2 months ago. To sweeten up a little, they’ve also characterized them by topics of interest. The following are topics as of now,

  • Entertainment
  • Fun & Interesting
  • Music
  • News
  • Photography & Art
  • Politics
  • Sports
  • Technology
You may create individual circles based on above topics, select and add people from the above list till your friends, family or known people be part of google+. If you feel the content is too much, you can always remove them from your circles or ignore people or block people altogether.

While this may be a cool feature and provide a great start to newbies, we also want to share our thoughts (or highlight risks)

  • It may spurn up content sharing race and could lead to spam
  • Alienate or frustrate people who couldn’t make it to the list
  • People already got it to the list are going to become more popular and risk the chances of others even get anywhere closer
  • May cause a huge gap between normal user vs celebrities or popular person, which could tilt the balance of the social network (we don’t want to see the same gap that exists in real world in a social network)
  • Abuse the popularity by promoting commercials (like for example people with huge followers on twitter charge in thousands for a tweet)
  • When google+ entity pages are released, they are going to share more content than anyone else and there is a great chance they may incentivize people for promoting content (easy SEO?)
We recommend google+ team to publish details about how people make it to this suggested user list. Also consider people selection by their frequency of usage in google+, authority inline content or posts shared by them, how users +1 or comment on that post, relevance of topic based on their area of expertise, etc..

We are also eager to hear thoughts from our readers, so please feel free to share them through the comments below.

5 Comments

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  1. Arbee

    My suggested friends were suspiciously a lot of people on my FB friends lists …I didn’t explicitly authorize google to use that info so I deleted the account and complained to google

    • Jocelyn

      I think you got it all wrong. Google+ suggests based on your gmail account and the people you have already added into your circle. If you “circled” people that you’re friends with on Facebook already, than yes, the same users would be suggested.

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