A recent phenomenon of the social web – aside from your parents commenting on drunk pictures of you on Facebook – is the smattering of buttons now adorning every website, from Justin Bieber fansites to CNN. These buttons allow you to share the information on the page with your friends or followers on the likes on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any number of link aggregators.
Recently these buttons – specifically Facebook’s “Like” and “Share” buttons, have been coming under increasing scrutiny – largely because the Javascript invoked by the button’s presence allows Facebook to track each and every button-equipped website you visit via your Facebook login cookie.
However this privacy scare doesn’t seem to have dampened appetites, and the continued buttonification of the web continues unabated. Today Twitter has launched its “Follow” button. The ubiquitous “Tweet” button (like the one adorning the top of this very article) allows users to share the content they are viewing, however the Follow button allows readers to follow the person associated with that content. A subtle, but important difference – and one that Twitter has only paid lip-service to up until today. The new button launches a pop-up which gives you a quick overview of a user’s profile with a prominent “Follow” button displayed.
Launch partners include personal landing page service About.me, and IMDb – who will be putting the buttons next to celebrity bio pages if they are on Twitter (see Jennifer Lopez’s page for an example).
Elsewhere in button land, rumour has it Google’s potentially game-changing +1 button is said to be seeing a public launch tomorrow. Why game-changing? Because Google will be using the data from +1 buttons as a search signal, meaning good quality sites that garner a lot of +1’s from the general public will be pushed higher in search results, while poor quality sites will sink to the bottom.
The feature has been available as an experiment in Google search results for some time, a leaked Chrome extension is on the way, as well as the all-important embeddable versions and the nifty dashboard that comes with them that Google recently showed off at their I/O 2011 conference.
Google now looks to be gearing up to launch the embeddable version, which will no-doubt be sitting alongside the Like and Tweet buttons of this world in no time.
