The holidays are here, and that means a lot of people are spending time on social networking sites spreading holiday cheer – and desperately trying to avoid relatives. If Google+ is your network of choice, you’ll likely notice that they’ve added a couple new features.

Perhaps the most important is the new “volume control” added to your streams. If you have a lot of people and pages in your circles it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the updates. The volume slider lets users prioritize streams to control how much information from each makes its way to your main stream, reducing noise from streams that aren’t as important to you.

Notifications are another area of improvement. Google’s main focus was to improve the quality of information in notifications, as they were previously short and cryptic. They now include a more substantial preview that makes understanding the update easier.

That’s not all. Google has updated Pages so that “managers” can be added to administer a page, and there’s a new aggregate popularity metric that combines people who +1 a page as well as people who add it to their circles. Google+ Photos has been redesigned as well, receiving a redesigned Lightbox interface and improved photo tagging.

These changes are all notable improvements of existing features. Google+ may be fighting an uphill battle against Facebook, but if updates like this become typical, they stand a chance.

Source: The Official Google Blog