Google Plus Sparks Video : Track and Monitor a Topic You Are Interested – a Google+ Version of Google Reader and News!


Are you a person who is interested in staying up to date in whatever topic you are passionate about? Are you a fan of google reader / google news? Then you are going to love google plus sparks.

Google Plus has some unique features that most of the social networks doesn’t have. Google Plus Sparks is such a powerful feature besides the popular stream, circles, huddle, games. Last month we did a quick survey about google plus features and surprisingly chat was the most popular feature and sparks & huddle were the least popular. So, we thought of highlighting the power of google plus sparks. Google+ sparks in short words is Striking a conversation to track or monitor about a particular topic you are interested.

In your Google+ page, if you look at the left bottom you’ll find a link called Sparks. Clicking on it will reveal the following featured interests / topics

  • Cycling
  • Fashion
  • Movies
  • Recipes
  • Soccer
  • Sports cars
  • Gardening
  • Android
  • Comics
  • Robotics
These are the few topics that ship by default with your google plus account. Click on any of the above topics and in the following page, you could just read the content found by google+ related to that topic or you can click on Add interest button to add this particular topic just below the sparks link. Next time you can just click this link to go directly to that particular topic (more like a shortcut).

But what makes google+ sparks more powerful is it’s keyword based search for topics followed by clicking on the Add interest button. This powerful feature will allow you to track any topic you are interested by filtering to the very granular level to the one specific topic you are interested. This is much better and powerful feature than the google reader  or google news minus the clutter.

Let’s say you are interested in US Economy, just click on Sparks link and in the sparks page, just type US Economy in the search box and click on Add interest. This will add a new link US Economy below the Sparks link and each time  all you have to do is just click that link to read the latest news or content about US Economy.

Here is a short video that highlights Google plus sparks feature

We use it everyday in our google plus account and thought this would be useful to our readers too. Prior to this most of the time we used Google Reader and Google News but they lack the kind of customization we were looking for. Now with Google+ sparks and it’s keyword based topic filtering feature allows us to just stick to our topic of interest, reduces distraction and saves time. Please share your stories through comments about google plus sparks.

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