Google +1 button for websites | Hacker News Reader

Google +1 button for websites

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123 pointsabraham95 comments

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.

So, you want Delicious?

In the browser.

I used to use a Firefox add-in for it, myself. Worked flawlessly in my usage

> 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).

That's my question too, shouldn't they have launched a website to display those +1s? Or at least release an API so that others can use it?

That would be Google Profiles, but only time will tell if it's going to take off.

> Nobody will see [your upvotes]

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.

Arn't they a signal for Google search and Ad rank? The SEO impact of that is pretty powerfull

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. ;-)

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

Good?

I'm guessing http://www.good.is/

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.

+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.

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.

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

Yeah, me too. I don't work on widget stuff in particular, but anecdotally looking at Techcrunch earlier today (and again just now), the Like buttons appear a few seconds before the +1 buttons...

how soon something appears on the page doesn't necessarily mean it's better. blocking scripts / document.write and other "non-best practice" things may appear first on the page.

smart loading is not about showing first, especially in the context of widgets i.e. not the main content of the site.

The biggest and most persistent issue seems to be that multiple copies of fairly heavy Javascript and CSS resources get loaded and parsed, one per per widget, on top of a relatively heavy document per button in the iframe itself, resulting in a rather quick inflation of the overall delivered page. PageSpeed says that for a simple test page with 10 "Like" buttons, a whopping 1.2MB of JS is parsed and run [1]. This doesn't include the additional overhead for the CSS; the total delivered size for 10 widgets is in the hundred of kilobytes. Anecdotally, I was able to reduce the heap size (as reported by Chrome) of some of our slower (to render) pages by a full 50% just by removing Facebook widgets, resulting in notably snappier page loads. Putting a bunch of Facebook widgets on a page just obliterated its load speed. We had issues with some pages actually crashing or hanging user browsers, and we consistently came back to the Facebook widgets as the biggest offender. Each iframe has to be parsed out into a document, its inline script run, its external scripts loaded, parsed, and run, and attached styles loaded and applied. Multiply by 20 buttons on a page and it got really slow really quickly.

What really impressed me about the Google implementation is that it collects the information about all the buttons on the page, and then fires off a single call to retrieve all information necessary to build them out (the /rpc call that seems to happen after just about everything else). That happens later in the page lifecycle, so the +1 button seems to take a bit longer to come up, but because it's all firing off at once it seems to result in a smoother overall page load experience. While I don't have a good unit test in front of me, I've often felt like pages stall out on Facebook widgets, and as far as I can tell, that's not really a concern with +1. The actual iframe loads are quite quick, the iframes are small, and are obviously built to render ASAP. The heavy lifting occurs much later. The Facebook widgets have seemed to be to be built with the assumption that there will ever only be one per page (heavy iframe document, multiple external scripts that will have to load in serial), resulting in pretty terrible bloat when you had multiples.

That said, in all fairness, in some quick tests tonight, the Facebook widgets seem to be far better-behaved than they were a few months ago, so it may be that my complaint is no longer relevant.

[1] http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/#url=http_3A_2F_2Fdl.dropbox...

Edit: Not really a complaint, but an observation - the like.php widget has an XHTML 1.0 doctype, which requires closing tags for non-empty elements. An HTML4 or HTML5 doctype would make that valid, though.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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?

Google said +1 won't influence search ratings. This is just a mark for your friends.

Except all your +1's are also published on your mandatory public google profile. It is private but public.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

They just started working for me.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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/

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

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

Thanks!

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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++

> "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 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:

    <!-- 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

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.

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.

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..

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.

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...

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.

Put the script tag after the content of your site.

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

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

There is now.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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