I’ve just had a go at installing the new Google like plus one button on this blog. It’s available in US English only and you have to opt in to the experiment in order to get it to work properly.
There are some handy instructions available on google on adding the button – it involves some Javascript in the header and a plus one tag <g:plusone></g:plusone> to render the button.
Not entirely sure how useful this is – particularly if it’s just related to Google Buzz which picks up my twitter feed anyway.
It seems very similar to Facebook like, but lacking the massively popular social network to back it up.
Update:
Now the plus one button has a massively popular social network (10 million users by July 2011) to back it up – the launch of Google Plus integrates with the button. For anyone not yet on plus one, in 10 seconds it:
- Has an activity stream just like facebook.
- Allows you to organise contacts using a neat drag and drop interface into ‘circles’ e.g. friends, family, colleagues which is much easier to use than facebook’s privacy settings.
- Allows you to share content with each circle differently e.g. hello friends here are my drunken photos from last night, hello colleagues here is my presentation for today’s meeting, again facebook sort of allows this but it’s horribly complicated to set up.
- Has a group video conference feature.
- lacks group or organisation/company pages – although this feature is coming soon.
The sharing content bit is where the plus one button comes in. Initial testing indicates that it helps with discovery of new pages into google, but has no effect on their page ranking.