Google +1 button for websites

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-button-for-websites-recommend-content.html

by abraham • 15 years ago

123 95 15 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

anigbrowl3• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

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.

abraham5• 15 years ago

Google Contacts has built in groups for friends, family and coworkers and several of Googles products support restrictions based on Contact groups.

anigbrowl3• 15 years ago

Ah, sorry for not stating that more clearly. What I meant by 'everyone at Facebook' was not the stuff on your wall etc., but where you see an article with the Facebook icon and 2,000 'likes' next to it. I don't expect that number to be reflective of my social graph in any way; it tells me only that 2000 Facebook users have expressed a liking for it. Likewise, a high number of votes for or against something on YouTube holds little personal interest for me, since so many people visit YouTube. But if there is a strong positive or negative bias among the peple I am in frequent contact with for particular google results, that's useful to me in the same way that the social graph is useful to you.

Arguably Google's results ecosystem is just a larger and less-structured social silo than Facebook or any other social networking service, but then the web itself is a subset of the internet and the internet is a subset of the whole dataverse. I'm not saying those other products/services are bad, just that this one will deliver more obvious utility to me, given my existing way of working.

zitterbewegung• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

tristanperry2• 15 years ago

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.

AndyNemmity5• 15 years ago

Preview didn't appear for me either, so I just put it on my site to look at it. They look great imo.

abraham5• 15 years ago

They just started working for me.

tristanperry2• 15 years ago

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

golgo13• 15 years ago

Not working for me in IE 9 (yes, I am that guy) or Opera 11.11 http://imgur.com/34Ad3

jmaygarden• 15 years ago

I'm just getting the following JavaScript that naturally does nothing.

    window.gapi={};
    window.gapi.plusone={
        go:function(){},
        render:function(){}
    };

bauchidgw• 15 years ago

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

AndyNemmity5• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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...

AndyNemmity5• 15 years ago

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.

abraham5• 15 years ago

Put the script tag after the content of your site.

AndyNemmity5• 15 years ago

Yeah, I did have it in the header, when it readd it in an hour, I'll have it at the bottom.

mtgentry2• 15 years ago

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.

rsoto• 15 years ago

Google doesn't think that the search is broken, so they aren't looking for fixes. And even if they were, the +1 button would be a heaven-sent for spammers, so that's not the fix they're looking for.

Lewisham• 15 years ago

Google does connect you to social graphs it can see:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...

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

mtgentry2• 15 years ago

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.

jnhnum1• 15 years ago

Your friends will see your recommendations, if they're relevant. You won't spam your friends by clicking +1 all over the place, but if your friends happen to be searching for something relevant to what you've +1'ed, I believe they will show up.

losvedir• 15 years ago

Hmm... the user could potentially benefit from better search results. This is, of course, being positioned as a social "like"-type button, but it definitely could have benefits individually, as well.

Imagine if Google looked at the history of your +1's, compared it to other users', etc, and improved your search results that way.

johnyzee• 15 years ago

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.

AndyNemmity5• 15 years ago

I didn't think slashdot when I saw it, so no.

I thought perl, and the standard ++ we do in chat rooms to say we like something. google++

mdwrigh2• 15 years ago

> "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.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

The term "+1" evokes, to me, RSVPs. It means that I want to go and take someone with me. I assumed it meant that I like this page, and someone I like may like it as well.

But honestly, it's not something I spent more than .1s thinking about until writing this.

duopixel3• 15 years ago

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.

sukuriant2• 15 years ago

So, you want Delicious?

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

In the browser.

Daniel142• 15 years ago

> Google is trying to throw it's weight at something it's competitors already do better.

I don't quite understand how you can do a like button "better". If by that you mean the number of current users, I disagree that Google should stop competing just because there are more people on FB.

duopixel3• 15 years ago

As of today, Google doesn't have a social platform to leverage +1. Without it, your upvotes are effectively going into a blackhole. Nobody will see them, so what's the point of upvoting and putting the button on your site?

swombat2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

ericmoritz• 15 years ago

Android's sharing intent does it right. We need a browser supported standard for sharing things much like they support RSS now. That way it'll be integrated and we won't need sites mucking up their design with this crap.

pandeiro• 15 years ago

Exactly. This is implemented fairly well in a few browser extensions, but it ought to be included in core functionality, as even 'sharing' links to your own email becomes a more prevalent paradigm than bookmarks/favorites.

jokermatt9992• 15 years ago

Off topic, but I wish Android's sharing intent would be extended into a sort of "open with..." functionality. It's great for sharing stuff, but I've had numerous occasions where I wanted to open something up in a different program (example: YouTube page to YouTube app, RSS feed to Reader, etc), but had no simple way of doing so on my phone. If you don't have a default app set, it will ask you when you open the links, but once you've made your selection, there's no easy way to switch.

abraham5• 15 years ago

+1 isn't a social sharing button. That is what Buzz is for. +1 is more akin to Digg/HN but integrated with SERPs instead of a separate destination.

cheald2• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, +1 is the best-implemented widget of its type, in my opinion. Facebook is a big baddie in this space; their widget implementations are horribly naive and drastically bog down pages.

kmavm• 15 years ago

Facebook engineering is right here, friend. If you have an idea for making our widget implementations less horribly naive, we're all ears.

ignifero2• 15 years ago

Couldn't agree more about the clutter. Try loading techcrunch; it blocks Chrome for 10 seconds on a sandy bridge i7!

It's this sheepish behavior of bloggers that lowers the quality of their content as well. Just gathering random people's friends isn't the smartest strategy to monetize content. Good quality content+seamless payments should replace this model.

_delirium• 15 years ago

> More clutter, slower loading pages, and gimmicks to get to you upvote a site.

I've been pretty happy with the improvement caused by http://www.disconnect.me/, especially on my relatively high-latency WiMax connection at home. It still lets you load e.g. facebook.com, but only when you actually go there on purpose, not as a widget in another page.

anigbrowl3• 15 years ago

slower loading pages

Strongly agree in that respect. Using the browser on my (android) phone has become increasingly unpleasant in recent months, because the address bar flashes up with every little data packet that comes in. Don't want to single out any particular firm or group of firms, but the signal:noise ratio seems to be in freefall lately.

electromagnetic• 15 years ago

I don't know where Web2.0 has gone wrong in recent years, but I thought a key ethos was usability.

I don't read techcrunch anymore because pageloads on my netbook have hit 20 seconds before I can scroll the page. Hacker news IIRC is still less than 250ms. Facebook is about 2 seconds till usability, but is still loading shit in the background, which hits it on par with MSN and Yahoo.

I don't get why a tech site like techcrunch would think it's acceptable to have such an absurdly long load time. Facebook lost me when page loads for every page took too long and they were only seconds. 1/3 of a minute back when I was learning to make my own websites was considered death, you wouldn't expect anyone to sit through the load.

vsiva68• 15 years ago

Does it make more sense for +1 to be part of the browser, as opposed to the website?

edanm• 15 years ago

"Google is trying to throw it's weight at something it's competitors already do better."

Google has one thing to offer its competitors don't - they can use the +1 button as a signal for their search algorithms.

As good as sharing a site on Facebook/Twitter is, it causes only a "momentary" increase in traffic. On the other hand, if the +1 button actually helps a site improve its rankings in Google, it could cause a sustained increase in traffic, something most websites will look very kindly on.

On the other hand, the fact that adding a +1 will cause much less of a single, highly visible high-impact traffic spike will mean its effects are harder to feel, which might make people consider it less important.

All in all, the war over widgets is just beginning.

Angostura• 15 years ago

I'm not quite clear in all of this whether clicking +1 will only tend to promote that content in the search results of your friends (Buzz connections) or whether it may have a wider SEO effect.

Can anyone clue me in?

jokermatt9992• 15 years ago

I've found AdBlock takes care of the cruft nicely. Whenever I see a widget like that, I just add it to my filter list, and suddenly that website loads a lot quicker.

paulnelligan• 15 years ago

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

executive• 15 years ago

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

abraham5• 15 years ago

There is now.

braindead_in2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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_in2• 15 years ago

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.

Sephr• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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:

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

petervandijck• 15 years ago

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

paganel• 15 years ago

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.

tmugavero• 15 years ago

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.

prasunsen2• 15 years ago

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

prasunsen2• 15 years ago

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

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

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.

notYoursAtAll• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

Thanks!

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

mkjones2• 15 years ago

I don't understand - what negative effect would this have on your employees workstation or your network - just slower page load times? Doesn't that seem a bit draconian?

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

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.

hxf148• 15 years ago

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..

mikecane• 15 years ago

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.

yahelc• 15 years ago

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

kaerast• 15 years ago

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.

olalonde• 15 years ago

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

jarin• 15 years ago

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.

rglover• 15 years ago

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.

bad_user• 15 years ago

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.

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

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

speleding2• 15 years ago

I agree it sucks, but they did just announce on the Google Apps blog that it will be coming "shortly" to Google Apps

speleding2• 15 years ago

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.

Google +1 button for websites

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