How to remove inactive users from Google+

As is the case with all other social networks, there are a a lot of users on Google+ who have never been active but only joined the network to test it out. In many cases, they might have added you to their circles and you might have also circled them back. In some cases, they might have changed their privacy settings since then and disabled sharing of any posts and updates with the circle in which they added you. So, in all such cases they are just occupying your circles without contributing anything worthwhile in return. The etiquette of circling back is not bad but the problem is that Google+ has a limit of 5000 maximum users all your circles combined. Secondly, those inactive users do not make any useful contributions to your stream and are simply wasting the space in your circles. So, it is a good idea to remove all such users who have never made any post available to you. For doing so, you would need to use another Google product which is the Google Chrome browser which you can download and install free of cost. After installing Google Chrome, you need to open the Uncircle+ Google Chrome extension page here. You will see the “Add to Chrome” option and you need to click on it. It will be installed almost instantly and you can see an icon on the top right corner of your chrome browser as displayed in the image below.

Then you would need to login inside your Google+ account. Once you are inside G+, please click on the Uncircle+ icon on your browser. It will automatically open up a screen and fill up all the people in your circles on that page. It might take sometime before it displays the circles data if you have a large number of contacts. So, wait for it to complete in such a scenario and once complete you will see a screen like this.

Then you would need to click on the “Find Inactive People!” button and it will filter out the inactive people who have never posted on Google+ or never shared any post with you. You will see the inactive users list as it gets populated and the progress of the search too as displayed in the image below.

Once the list is populated, you will see the inactive users and a “Removed Selected” button below it. All the inactive users are selected by default but you can also remove any users from the list if you wish. Then you need to press on the “Remove Selected” button to initiate the uncircling of all those inactive users. After it is complete, you will be able to see the details of the process as displayed in the image below.

Though it is a good and effective extension but it seems to be buggy while handling large lists. It hung up at least twice for me when I tried it out while creating this tutorial. I would personally not recommend using this extension too often unless your are reaching the maximum users limit in your circles. There are a lot of new Google+ users joining in the past few days and so, some of them might decide to update only when they get time. Many old users of Google+ might also return back to the social networks as it is now public which means their friends can also be on Google+. So, use it option wisely and if possible use it only when you are nearing the maximum users limit.

Incoming search terms:

• uncircle google plus