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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
But this is the creation of a social platform. They've just turned their search results, one of the most used things on the web, into a place where you will now see recommendations from friends if you search for topics where they've already +1'd it. It creates pretty much the same value as a Facebook like. You and I may dislike it and it does cause clutter, but Facebook likes are very popular with users and drive a lot of traffic. Google is doing the same on what I believe is a larger group of people and what I know is giving much more relevant information (i.e., I don't get informed about my friends' opinion on sneakers until I actively look for sneakers).
If I understood the article correctly, that isn't true. According to Google, your friends/contacts will see your +1s in their search results, meaning they'll have an additional hint at choosing the best result for them.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. ;-)
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
95 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadNot 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.
It would still be a violation of privacy because it is crossing the friend/contact line.
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.
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.
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.
It's difficult to imagine that Google has been 'slashdotted' due to serving up a javascript widget...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine if Google looked at the history of your +1's, compared it to other users', etc, and improved your search results that way.
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.
I thought perl, and the standard ++ we do in chat rooms to say we like something. google++
It seems like you, based on unstatistical evidence of Google Engineers, decided they were all Borg and incapable of feeling.
But honestly, it's not something I spent more than .1s thinking about until writing this.
-1
+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?
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.
If I understood the article correctly, that isn't true. According to Google, your friends/contacts will see your +1s in their search results, meaning they'll have an additional hint at choosing the best result for them.
<div class="g-plusone" data-size="standard" data-count="true"></div>
[0] http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/
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
Hopefully Ghostery/Disconnect will start blocking this soon, too.
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. ;-)
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.
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..