Google is trying to throw it's weight at something it's competitors already do better. Even if it does catch on, we all lose with the social sharing craze that is littering the web. More clutter, slower loading pages, and gimmicks to get to you upvote a site.<p>This has happened before, first it was the syndication format craze with icons for RSS, RSS 2.0, atom, xml, etc. Then it was the aggregator craze (Digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon, etc) and now it's the social craze (Facebook, Twitter, etc).<p>There's a clear need for sharing what you like, from the perspective of the user and the publisher. I've put these buttons into my design, but I'd rather see the browsers' favorites revamped into a searchable database that allows easy sharing and get rid of this madness.
It's unclear what the user gains by clicking on a +1 button. Clearly my friends won't see my recommendations because Google doesn't connect me to them.<p>They should just come out and say "listen, we know search is broken. We need your help to fix it! Click on this button when you see something you like on the web."<p>Position it as a passionate call to arms to all google users. Right now it feels like a boring press release.
Ugh, another button. The check-in buttons are coming next. Soon, there will be an aggregate button that lets you Like, Follow, +1, Check-in, Tweet, Post to FB, and save the page for later. There will be no more corporate or personal websites to house the aggregate button either. They will live on an aggregate page which has all the feeds from all the social networks in one place. This aggregate page will itself live on a social network which will have many clones that need to be aggregated. Goodbye signal, hello noise.
One thing that's going in it's favor is the SEO advantage you get. This data is eventually going to play some role in the SERP rankings, one way or other. I'm not sure if it's confirmed by Google, but it apparent enough. That's incentive enough for sites to add this button.
It'll be good to test this feature; it sounds like it could be a useful addition to the other social-esque 'like this' type buttons.<p>One thing though, the 'add +1 to your website' page (<a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html</a>) is broken for me.<p>I see the following in vanilla Firefox 4.0.1, Windows 7 64-bit:<p><a href="http://www.tristanperry.com/pics/GoogleSite.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.tristanperry.com/pics/GoogleSite.jpg</a><p>Changing the settings doesn't fix the fact that the preview doesn't appear (and that its bounding box is overflowing)<p>Just an FYI.
I wish it came with a -1 as well, but I imagine that will develop by itself. Significantly, this is based on your contacts, rather than what everyone at Facebook/Digg/whoever likes. I think this is a winning characteristic.
Given what my friends "Like" on FB (I'm friends with them for other reasons), a similar signal (aka "noise") in Google search results seems almost or actually to be a disincentive, for me personally, to forming "connections".<p>I think this may be an attempt to conflate two things that for some (many?) remain separate domains.<p>EDIT: OTOH, general initiatives to improve search results (i.e. Panda) have been quite useful, for me.<p>Now I'm sitting here, wondering why/how I end up repeatedly sounding negative about various Google "social" initiatives -- as actually incorporated. It's not that I'm against their trying. But... they do seem to keep missing the mark.
I'm feeling like this is another 'Buzz', another failed attempt to get social. The proposed idea of sharing stuff with my 'friends and contacts' rings very hollow, since the vast majority of my google contacts are people I've only emailed once, and never have met. For a company seemingly filled with very smart people, this is a pretty basic mistake.<p>-1
Pff, doesn't work with Google Apps accounts, as these accounts can't have a Google Profile.<p>So here is Google offering me the best and most useful online service I ever used (Google Apps), and they can't integrate it with their services properly.
What's with everyone making up tag names and undefined namespaces nowadays? <g:plusone>? A simple <span> with a class or data attribute would suffice.
added to my Enterprise hosts file: (for workers)<p>127.0.0.1 www.co2stats.com
127.0.0.1 apis.google.com
127.0.0.1 l.sharethis.com
127.0.0.1 w.sharethis.com
127.0.0.1 wd.sharethis.com
127.0.0.1 plusone.google.com
127.0.0.1 platform.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 seg.sharethis.com<p>any others I am missing? need to make sure this garbage is kept off of business workstations and the network
Isn't "+1" kind of an insider reference to the Slashdot voting system? It may be instantly recognizable to us, but is it really intuitive what this does to the vast masses of everyday-Joe internet users? Seems to me like another hit from engineer driven Google product development.<p>Also: <i>"But sometimes you want to +1 a page while you’re on it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that recipe for chocolate flan if you haven’t tried it out yet?"</i><p>I may be having a case of the Mondays here or something, but I really hate this kind of forced chipperness in corporate communication, and I am seeing a lot of it from Google, most recently in the 'funny' "Let's put more cats on the internet!" marketing for the Chrome netbook. Again it seems like some high-brow Google engineers, based on statistical evidence that humans have feelings, decided to employ some grandmother type to filter all their marketing through.
I'm surprised WordPress.com wasn't on board with this at the start. It already has Like buttons (ugh) as well as Twitter, Facebook, etc. WordPress is otherwise great at getting its blog posts into Google results, so I figured this was a natural.
In case anyone's wondering how to add the +1 button to their Posterous (which doesn't allow Javascript), feel free to use this iframe:<p><pre><code> <!-- default size: 110x30, tall: 50x60 -->
<iframe src="http://dev.syskall.com/plusone/?url={Permalink}&size=tall" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:0;width:50px;height:60px;"></iframe>
</code></pre>
I'll publish the PHP script on my github[1] shortly in case you want to host it yourself.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/olalonde/google-plusone-posterous" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/olalonde/google-plusone-posterous</a>
Out of all of Google's social efforts, this is the most promising yet. What's unique about this is that (if they're keeping a search oriented business model) it could allow for a more social ranking system. In other words, after a link gets so many recommendations, it moves up in search. I for one would love a search feature where I could click "recommended" and see if anyone I know has had experience with the topic. Baby steps are imperative with this one.
Hmm, too bad that the HTML4 code they propose fails validation with my validator (Nokigiri) and the HTML5 code they propose doesn't seem to work on HTML4 pages.<p>I solved it by mixing and matching the two:
<div class="g-plusone" size="small" count="false"></div><p>This fails the official W3C validator but it works with Nokogiri. The odd way to set the language of the button {"lang":"de"} trips up syntax error marking in my IDE too.
Tried to integrate it on <a href="http://infostripe.com" rel="nofollow">http://infostripe.com</a> but ran into issues of it not rendering as expected or when expected, the counter balloon having some CSS background issues.<p>I'll try it again in a bit but I am disappointed so far with the implementation. Maybe it's getting crushed.. but it is Google..
Well, the +1 button worked for a good 10 minutes, and then my site stops responding trying to pull the js from google. down for 2 minutes, now back up again.<p>Must be a frenzy.<p>EDIT: when it came back up, it also didn't have my saved +1. I had to redo it.<p>Seems pretty buggy right now.<p>EDIT 2: Okay, my site is down again. I'm removing the button for awhile.
This has the same problem as Facebook Likes - you can create a +1 for a url other than the one you are currently on. And spot the javascript callback which encourages a '+1 this page to reach the video' setup.
I sort of have an issue with the name. I can understand that the average user would understand Facebook's Like and Twitters follow but I see that +1 is sort of technical jargon...
Ok, I've added it to one of my clients' sites (NOT WORK SAFE <a href="http://www.dirtyhotproductions.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dirtyhotproductions.com</a> NOT WORK SAFE).<p>I'm not sure if anyone will use it on there (especially with the big warning about your +1s being publicly viewable), but here's hoping it boosts search engine rankings at least.