Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

There is one thing that Google+ currently lacks that both Twitter and Facebook have:

  Like us on Facebook! facebook.com/ProductFoo
    
  Follow us on Twitter! @ProductFoo

In G+'s (hypothetical, since they haven't done it yet) case, neither the phrase nor the url are as catchy or memorable:

  +1 us on Google! plus.google.com/ProductFoo

View on HN

They already have this, but it's a bit hidden.

They're replacing the @ with +, which really ties the whole service together quite nicely (while integrating +1's as well).

Your example would use +ProductFoo, for example. If you are writing a G+ post, if you type +, it will prompt for suggestions, much like Facebook does with @.

I'm surprised it's not highlighted by Google, but they do mention it, buried in the help (which is very nicely laid out, if not hidden).

http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?page=gu...

Or was it "Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/ProductFoo" at first?

The same way +1 could develop in to "+1 ProductFoo". Just give it some time.

or just +ProductFoo

I think this is the most likely. The top left of the google bar is +[name], and Andy Hertzfeld referenced other people in this way in his post: https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts/FddaP6je...

How about a more natural-sounding "add us on Google!"

There is one thing I love about +1: It's a lot more neutral than Like or Follow. I can +1 a story about, say, someone getting shot and it won't look as if I like that someone was shot.

Follow means "subscribe to our feed", Like means "subscribe and upvote", +1 just means "upvote". Google's had similar verbs in terms of interface (stars/bookmarks, SearchWiki voting, likes, etc.), but they weren't public. The SearchWiki announcement emphasized, "The changes you make only affect your own searches." [0]

reddit, HN, and StackOverflow have only scratched the surface of can be done with upvoting. I would very much like to see Google add a prominent "+ Average", like HN's comment score average. As we've seen here on HN, focusing on total upvotes (i.e. the now hidden Leaderboard) seems to encourage quantity of comments, while displaying one's average may encourage quality. Facebook and Twitter are clearly optimized for quantity; the best hope for Google+, hopelessly behind in terms of sheer content, may be to push users to generate/share more interesting content, rather than more.

[0] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...

How about "circle us" on Google+?

Edit: I did see mentioned on G+ that they would eventually build in support for organisations, so presumably you would add them to one of your circles if you wanted to receive updates.

I wonder if Google will buy the "plus" TLD for this.

google.com/+productfoo

Why not? It's not like the namespace +{whatever} is likely to be in use at google already.

Better yet, Google is much more used as a verb than any other site I can think of. "Just Google +ProductFoo", etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com