I’ve been getting emails recently from correspondents complaining that I have not responded to their comments/postings on Google+. I’ve just figured out why.
The new (Google unified) Google+ desktop notification panel is losing G+ notifications left and right. For a while I thought that all of the extra notifications I was seeing when I checked on mobile occasionally were dupes — but it turns out that most of them are notifications that were never presented to me on desktop, in vast numbers.
Right now I can find (on the essentially unusable G+ desktop standalone notifications page, which requires manually clicking to a new page for each post!) about 30 recent G+ notifications that were never presented to me in the desktop notification panel. I’m not even sure how to deal with them now in a practical manner.
This is unacceptable — you have one job to do, notifications panel, and that’s to accurately show me my damned notifications!
Also, a high percentage of the time when I click on actions in the new desktop notification panel pop-up boxes (e.g. to reply), the panel blows away and I’m thrown to a new G+ page tab.
Does anyone at G bother to stress test this stuff any more in the context of users with many followers (I have nearly 400K) who get lots of notifications? Apparently not.
Another new Google user interface triumph of form over function!
–Lauren–