A few weeks ago Google lifted the lid on its next social effort, and its answer to Facebook’s “Like”, the +1 button. The functionality is simple – a small +1 icon appears next to search results and embedded in pages for you to press if you think the content is useful or noteworthy. The wider implications, however, could be far more meaningful, as +1 activity can be taken as a wider search signal, allowing Google to get their users to do some of the legwork involved in finding good content.
The +1 button has been available as an optional experimental feature on Google.com for some time, however one of the sessions over at Google’s I/O 2011 conference has dished out some more details regarding how the service will work, and when it will see a wider release.
The +1 button will be available for embedding in your website “in a matter of weeks”, Google’s Timothy Jordan told the assembled developers in San Francisco – and will bring with it a whole slew of goodies to help analyse your site’s traffic and demographics. Once a certain amount of +1s have been accumulated you will be able to view anonymised data for your visitors (at least, those that have clicked the +1 buttons), including sex, age and location.
Presumably once the +1 button is unleashed to website owners it will also go live across all Google properties, not just as an opt-in experiment.
A lot is resting on Google’s social efforts. Co-Founder and CEO Larry Page has directly tied employee bonuses to the search giant’s success this year in the social sphere – a sphere in which it has previously failed to gain traction. Worse than that, its handling of the launch of Buzz, a pseudo-Twitter competitor, attracted a slap on the wrist from the DoJ for breaches of user privacy.
Via SearchEngineLand
