
Google +1 button for websites - abraham
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-button-for-websites-recommend-content.html
======
duopixel
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.

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).

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.

~~~
swombat
_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._

Couldn't agree more. I've made a deliberate effort to not buy into the craze
with swombat.com. Anything that can't be restyled as a text link which blends
into the no-graphics minimalist style of the site just ain't gonna happen.

One small concession I've made is that I show the reddit upvote widget for
people who have come directly via Reddit. Like that's helped me. ;-)

~~~
thomasgerbe
I love the way Good implemented the Twitter/Facebook sharing feature. Very
minimal.

~~~
swombat
Good?

~~~
user-id
I'm guessing <http://www.good.is/>

------
mtgentry
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.

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."

Position it as a passionate call to arms to all google users. Right now it
feels like a boring press release.

~~~
Lewisham
Google does connect you to social graphs it can see:

[http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=1067707)

I wouldn't say that +1 is saying "search is broken" at all. It's just another
signal.

~~~
mtgentry
Re: the social graphs, I should have said that for me personally, my friends
aren't on any of those services so that's why it isn't relevant.

I'm saying +1's main reason for existence SHOULD be to fix search. And they
should say as much. A better search experience is a much more valuable thing
than friend recommendations.

------
tmugavero
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.

------
braindead_in
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.

~~~
nanoanderson
This is something I feel like people are discounting.

+1 won't displace Liking as a _social network feature_, but it will be very
interesting to see how it plays out as a _social search feature_, which is why
I'm looking for how best to implement it on my own sites.

Wouldn't you be more inclined to choose a result on Google if people you
know/trust +1'd it?

~~~
braindead_in
Yes, Google can easily rank the search results based on +1's in your social
network if you're logged in. The implications are really interesting. It has
to succeed though first. People have to start +1'ing for it to happen.

------
tristanperry
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.

One thing though, the 'add +1 to your website' page
(<http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html>) is broken for me.

I see the following in vanilla Firefox 4.0.1, Windows 7 64-bit:

<http://www.tristanperry.com/pics/GoogleSite.jpg>

Changing the settings doesn't fix the fact that the preview doesn't appear
(and that its bounding box is overflowing)

Just an FYI.

~~~
abraham
They just started working for me.

~~~
tristanperry
Ah yep, works for me now. Is working well :)

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anigbrowl
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.

~~~
flyt
Sorry, but Facebook's graph describes my actual friends. Gmails with my bank
and landlord are not a better representation of my contacts.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
To most people Facebook's graph represents their friends, their family, their
coworkers, people they went to high school with, random people who sent a
request even though you met them once at a party... that is the norm. I've
been saying for a while that the best representation of a true social graph is
on you Android and iPhones. the people you call, text, email, and Facebook
wall post are the people you care about. Why Google and Apple haven't used
this to their advantage yet, I'm not sure.

~~~
nostrademons
There're potential privacy implications to using your call logs to build an
implicit social graph. People have an expectation that their phone call
records will remain private; look at all the trouble the NSA got into when
they started spying on them. There's no such expectation when you explicitly
give your relationship data to a third-party website.

Not to say it won't happen, but a bunch of things need to be worked out on the
legal/ethical/cultural side of things before this is practical. As PG always
says, social changes take longer than technical changes.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
No need to violate anyone's privacy; do it completely on the client side. Then
bridge to public via Buzz (in the case of Google).

~~~
hessenwolf
I have two contacts in my email, one is my Mom, and the other is my male boss.
All of a sudden I am seeing lots of transgenderfication sites in my results.
Mom?

It would still be a violation of privacy because it is crossing the
friend/contact line.

------
pasbesoin
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".

I think this may be an attempt to conflate two things that for some (many?)
remain separate domains.

EDIT: OTOH, general initiatives to improve search results (i.e. Panda) have
been quite useful, for me.

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.

------
paulnelligan
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.

-1

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bauchidgw
well, lets just hope they don't just deprecate it - due to the "economic
burden" - the second after we all implemented it.

------
bad_user
Pff, doesn't work with Google Apps accounts, as these accounts can't have a
Google Profile.

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.

~~~
MartinCron
Not only that, it's the flavor of their services that you are paying for.
Drives me crazy.

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Sephr
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.

~~~
Encosia
I had the same reaction. Looking into the documentation[0], it turns out that
you can also use a div with data- attributes instead, like this:

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="standard" data-count="true"></div>

[0] <http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/>

------
yahelc
Best feature here: built-in support for callback functions. Makes Google
Analytics integration seamless!

------
notYoursAtAll
added to my Enterprise hosts file: (for workers)

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

any others I am missing? need to make sure this garbage is kept off of
business workstations and the network

~~~
mtogo
Thanks!

Hopefully Ghostery/Disconnect will start blocking this soon, too.

------
petervandijck
Which friends though? Who are these friends that I am recommending it to??

~~~
paganel
Your GMail contacts. Wait, they can't do that anymore! I genuinely don't know
then, they must have a clever algorithm in place to create a brand new list of
friends, depending on your past searches.

------
johnyzee
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.

Also: _"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 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.

~~~
mdwrigh2
> "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."

It seems like you, based on unstatistical evidence of Google Engineers,
decided they were all Borg and incapable of feeling.

------
mikecane
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.

------
olalonde
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:

    
    
        <!-- 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>
    

I'll publish the PHP script on my github[1] shortly in case you want to host
it yourself.

[1] <https://github.com/olalonde/google-plusone-posterous>

------
rglover
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.

------
speleding
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.

I solved it by mixing and matching the two: <div class="g-plusone"
size="small" count="false"></div>

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.

------
hxf148
Tried to integrate it on <http://infostripe.com> but ran into issues of it not
rendering as expected or when expected, the counter balloon having some CSS
background issues.

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..

------
AndyNemmity
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.

Must be a frenzy.

EDIT: when it came back up, it also didn't have my saved +1. I had to redo it.

Seems pretty buggy right now.

EDIT 2: Okay, my site is down again. I'm removing the button for awhile.

~~~
willscott
That seems hard to believe. The buttons seem to show up fine on tech crunch
and google search.

It's difficult to imagine that Google has been 'slashdotted' due to serving up
a javascript widget...

~~~
AndyNemmity
I certainly agree, it's not like I don't use google to host jquery, or any
other number of things.

However it was seriously hanging on that one js call. Perhaps it's just my
experience, but I'm going to wait at least an hour before I try again. I like
my site responding.

------
executive
and yet there is no +1 button on that page..

~~~
abraham
There is now.

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kaerast
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.

------
zitterbewegung
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...

~~~
Drakim
Nah, even my technological challenged family understands the concept of giving
a website plus one point. +1 is fairly simple to understand as a positive
thing both inside and outside of a computer context.

------
prasunsen
Funny, the "Get code" link in the email Google sent me goes to 404 page. Fail.

~~~
prasunsen
What's the deal with the downvote? Even the button in the Adsense interface
does not work.

~~~
MartinCron
I didn't down vote, but I guess it was a reaction against using "fail" as a
standalone sentence. There are some curmudgeons who don't like that newfangled
interweb colloquialisms.

------
jarin
Ok, I've added it to one of my clients' sites (NOT WORK SAFE
<http://www.dirtyhotproductions.com> NOT WORK SAFE).

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.

