Google has started rolling out the ability to collapse and expand comments in the Google+ stream. They’ve also announced a few tweaks to the way comments are displayed in real time.
Google designer Jonathan Terleskij shared a video on Google+ (which has suddenly stopped working for some reason), explaining the new features:
“It’s been great to hear that one of your favorite parts about Google+ is the dynamic nature of the Stream,” he says. “In real-time, posts and comments arrive in your stream — no refresh required. While this is pretty awesome, it can sometimes be overwhelming. You’ve said that really active conversations with lots of comments can take over your stream. And comments appearing in real-time can sometimes make updates hard to read.”
“Well, today, we’re fixing all this,” he adds. “First, we’re making it so you can easily expand and collapse comments in the Stream. Just click once to expand, click again to collapse. And when comments arrive in real-time, we’ll automatically collapse them. But, we’ll still keep track of which comments you’ve read and which you haven’t. This way, you get to choose when to engage and when not to.”
I’m not sure if the feature is going to be as game-changing as Google’s recent announcement of the addition of games to Google+, but anything to make the service more usable should only help Google+ continue to grow.