I agree with all your points except the last one. Why would you not want to know who has added you in real-time? It gives you immediate visibility and allows you to circle back, if you want to. What's your take on it?

+Chris Westcott It's interesting but I have to scroll past it to get at the real notifications. I'm happy it's there, It just takes up screen real estate and gets in the way. I hardly ever follow people who follow me, but just occasionally spot somebody I know.

Suggestions? Me neither, not one.

I'm 100% with you on the famous people. That's nearly as annoying as people I follow reposting posts from famous people. Admittedly that's more of a Twitter problem than G+.

And the same goes for you Facebook. Your suggested subscriptions suck because way too many of them suffer from the same criteria. I have this suspicion that the reason I'm seeing all this crap is partly because I'm in the circles and subscription lists of several of the technorati.

It ought to be possible to make the suggestion box go away by fiddling with CSS. Rather than fiddle with it myself, what I normally do in such cases is search online for some inevitable bright spark who thought the same thought, did something about it using CSS, and then thoughtfully wrote a brief, clear account of how to do it.

Choice of search terms left as an exercise for the reader.

The notification problem may well be susceptible to the same approach. The element containing the annoyance just needs to be made invisible.