Some of our reader base may have already gotten a taste of the new Google+. Some of you undoubtedly love it and some, I’m sure, absolutely hate it. Controversial redesigns are not a new thing by any means, especially among apps such as social networking that are used so often and in such a personal manner. It’s only natural that users would react negatively to any change, let alone one that causes functions to become more complicated or seemingly disabled altogether. One thing that those who hate the new UI may find comforting is that the ability to sort and curate your stream by circles is, in fact, not gone forever. It has been crippled a bit and buried deep in the settings menu, but it’s still there and plenty useful for most.
In order to access it, you’ll first need to open up your settings. From there, scroll all the way to the bottom. There, nestled in the far reaches of your settings, you’ll find a button shown as “Advanced Settings”. If you open that, you’ll find a few more options, one of which is “Enable circle stream in navigation”. Upon flipping the switch here, the sidebar will be blown away and replaced by one that features a new tab bearing the name, “Circle Streams”. This is where your normal circle-based streams will be. The kicker, however, is that only six of your circles can now be shown here. If you have the normal Google+ setup and have not messed with your circles, or if you have less than six, you should be good to go. If you do have more than six, however, there’s not much that can be done aside from pruning your circles down.
This isn’t the first time Google or anybody else has messed up the layout and functionality of a much-loved app, though Google seems to hope that the new Google+, despite virtual shouts of criticism littering the social network, will catch on with just a few alterations. Some users are even reporting that Google+ is currently broken for them as a result of implementing the changes, however.