Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [33]
GOOGLE NOTIFICATIONS CAN TAKE several different forms, and they reach you in different places. The following sections explain the various ways Google+can let you know about what’s happening in your circles and streams.
When you first sign up for Google+, before you’ve changed any settings (or installed the Google+ app on your smartphone), Google+ notifies you about pretty much everything by email. When something happens on the site that involves you, it sends an email to the address associated with your Google account. For example, when someone mentions you in a post, you’ll receive an email like the one here.
That image shows a notification email in Gmail, but the message should look about the same in Outlook or any other email program. The subject of the email is “Re: Virus scan nobody wants you” because that’s the full text of the original post. (Most posts aren’t that short, of course, so for longer posts you’d see a truncated version in the subject line, like “Virus scan, nobody wants you, because…”) The top part of the email explains what happened—“Rachel Ward mentioned you in a comment on Rachel Ward’s post”—and, below that, the mention itself, with the names linked to Google+ profiles. Beneath that is the text of the original post (which may be truncated if it’s longer than a sentence or two), a sentence that tells you how many other comments the post had when this email was sent, and a link to the post itself. Below all that, there are a few useful links.
The first link (“Rachel Ward,” in this example) goes straight to the profile of the person who mentioned you. The Mute link is really handy, especially if you’re getting a lot of emails about this particular post. When you click it, you’ll hop straight to your Notifications stream (Writing a post while viewing a circle’s stream), where you’ll see a notice that that the post has been muted. After you do that, you won’t receive any further notifications about activity in that post, and it won’t bounce up near the top of any streams even if it starts getting lots of +1s, comments, or edits—just as if you’d manually muted the post in your stream (as explained on Blocking, Muting, and Reporting Posts).
Click the Change link to open your browser to your Google+ settings page, which is covered in detail starting on Controlling Which Notifications You Receive. Finally, the “View the post” link opens your browser to the post itself.
These email notifications change in a few subtle ways depending on what you’re being notified about. When someone you haven’t added to one of your circle adds you to one of theirs, for example, the email looks as shown on the next page.
There’s a thumbnail pic of the person who added you that links to his profile, a big red button for quickly adding him back, and links to change your notification settings, view the person’s profile, and block that person to prevent him from seeing anything from you (see Blocking, Muting, and Reporting Posts).
If someone is already in your circles but they add you to one of their circles, the email notification just includes her profile picture, a “View profile” button that links to her profile, and the ever-present Change link.
TIP
If you haven’t received any email notifications (you should have gotten one when you joined the site, for example), check your email program’s spam folder. Some web-based email services, like Yahoo and Hotmail, can also file notifications in a folder named something like Notifications or Bulk. To make sure your Google+ notifications end up in your main inbox, check your email settings, and click the Not Spam or similar button.
The Notifications Panel
Once you’ve signed up for Google+, you’ll notice that whenever you’re logged into your Google account and you view nearly any Google site—such as Google. com, Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Docs—you’ll see a black bar across the very top of the page. (If you’ve selected a Gmail theme, the bar could be white or gray instead). This is the Google toolbar. The left side of this bar contains