Google+ has done right by the staff of Ars in many ways. In particular, we like the private discussions afforded by circles and not having to pretend to be "friends" with a bunch of people we just don't know.

But there are other parts of the service that seem half-baked or are problematic, and there's almost nothing that the little red notification box does that isn't annoying. We know it's a free service, but given that the staff has already sunk a hefty amount of time sorting everyone we know into circles, we have some interest in seeing the service improve. Google: here are our suggestions on how to improve Google+.

Circles you can hide from your main stream of news

Google+ gives users a fantastic level of control over who sees your outgoing content—you can post raunchy jokes to the Friends circle, something pious to the Mom circle—but once you've circled someone, anyone, even if it was just to be nice, all of their content is lumped in with everyone else's on your main Google+ stream.

Even Facebook has an option to hide the oversharers from your News feed. But Google could do one better here and and allow users to shuffle certain circles into a secondary view, suggests Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher. "Perhaps it would suffice to give users the ability to flag a whole circle as 'Exclude from Index View,' leaving their content only to be read while visiting the circle directly," Fisher said.

This capability is almost included in the mobile app, where an interface lets you check which circles to display, but then you must swipe between the individual circles.

More informative follow notifications

When you get a notification that someone has circled you, you are provided with only their name. After you click on the notification, you can see a tiny picture. The immediate next step we take is to roll over the name, just to see a popup with shared follows and a line of text that describes that person's line or place of work, to get a little context. That's about two steps more than necessary. Fisher said of the current layout, "Google may think that this minimalist view is inviting, but it makes scanning your list and assigning people to various circles more tedious than it should be."

You could argue that if neither the name and picture are recognizable, our decision to pursue further info is our own poor choice, because that person is obviously not a friend. But many users treat social media not just as a way to see our friends' updates on yet another webpage, but also to make new connections—many of the people added to my work-related circles are people I've "met" via circling notifications. That little bit of descriptive text and shared follows should not require a rollover, but rather just be presented in the notification pane, alongside their picture and "Add to circles" button.

Related: don't make us roll over the tiny gray 'Limited' link to see who a post is shared with. At least sprinkle a few tiny portraits up there so we can get an idea of who else is seeing it. Then, as Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng says, "those who respond can have a better idea of who's seeing their responses without having to hover over a vague link that they may never discover on their own."

Make "Lock post" and "Disable comments" accessible before the post goes live

When making a post with sensitive content, we occasionally care whether followers are able to reshare something that may have only been intended for a limited audience. Google+ allows users to disable resharing on a post, but only after it's live. Why not before?

No, we don't think we're Lindsay Lohan or anything, and people aren't clamoring to gossip about our juicy Google+ posts, but it just doesn't make sense that resharing can only be disabled after the fact. Aurich Lawson, Ars's creative director, notes that "the way G+ can move in real time, it doesn't take long for people to take actions on posts." Likewise, the ability to disable comments before posting deserves a spot in the same (currently non-existent) post settings menu.

The ability to manage which events you get notifications for

Better management of notifications in general: come back here, little red box. We're not done with you yet. We've noticed that we can turn off any semblance of a follow/mention favorite notification in Twitter (if the e-mail notifications are off, you'll never be notified of any events otherwise on the actual website). Facebook will always show small message and friending notifications on its own page, but since the Google+ notification box shows up on webpages we use constantly (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, even the search page), we need some settings to reel it in a little.

Currently, Google+ pops a notification for every little thing: a mention, a circle, a comment on a mention in a circle. It would take only a few spammers to take a notification window from something interesting that draws us into browsing Google+ for few minutes into a big mess. You can mute notifications from posts, but not in a global setting.

There is also a setting in Google+ to take your profile out of search results, effectively making it private and preventing just anyone from popping a notification on you, but this is a little extreme. Likewise, you can report posts as spam, and Google has plenty of experience dealing with spam via Gmail, but not in an instance where targets have been so discoverable, as with most Google+ profiles.

Therefore, we see no reason not to include customization settings to turn off notifications regarding people not in your circles, for instance, or notifications of getting circled in general. We'd like to keep them viewable in a separate pane, but as it is, they often just constitute notification clutter.

Better control of post formatting

When you post a link or picture to Google+, it pulls information from the page and puts together its own franken-summary of what you're trying to show your friends. Facebook does the same thing, but wasn't the point of Google+ to not be Facebook (except when it's exactly like Facebook)?

John Siracusa, Ars's Apple specialist, says he wants to be able to make real HTML links, not just URLs that get auto-highlighted, as well as adjust the thumbnail and text used in the link previews. "The authoring features are so limited, and the result of the auto-generated stuff often looks awful," said Siracusa.

HTML formatting in general would be a welcome feature, if not one the average social media user would take advantage of. Google favors their slightly wackier and limited system of encasing text with asterisks or hyphens to produce formatting, but a few basic HTML standards would be a welcome addition.

A more complete mobile app

Google did a decent job pushing out the mobile version of Google+ pretty quickly, with even the iPhone version arriving mere weeks after launch. But some features have failed to materialize in the mobile version—little things, but they add up.

For example, we can't post videos from the mobile app. We can't share posts with individual people. We can +1 posts, but not the comments on posts. And one-on-one Huddles are like the Hotel California: you can mute them, but you can never leave. Google recently added the ability to hide Huddles from your list, so you have some way to get rid of one-on-ones, but once Huddles are hidden, you can't un-hide them. The mobile apps may be a low priority for Google, but they're becoming a iterated pile of half-baked solutions.

Overall, we like Google+, and the service is undergoing constant small changes, usually for the better. If the improvements and refinements continue, we see no reason why the service couldn't continue on its path to become a social network powerhouse.