Mountain View, California — Following in the footsteps of social media leader Facebook’s Like feature, search engine titan Google intends to make their +1 Button more social too by introducing friend annotations to it, and for those who are eagle-eyed, they would surely have noticed that the faces and names of your mates will appear whenever your cursor hovers over a +1 button.
The button which tentatively appeared in March this year on Google search now displays friend annotations. The “+1” button you see on many websites is a simple way to give something your mark of approval. But unless you share your +1’s on your Google+ profile or your friends spot them in search results, no one will ever really know that you cared about a particular site or story.
According to Mashable, a list of users is displayed when one hovers over the button. Seems like Google is influenced from its current biggest rival Facebook, as this feature of +1 bears striking resemblances to the latter’s Like button.
“You may have already noticed faces and names when you hover over a +1 button,” Google Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan said in a post on the Google+ Platform preview. “This particular change was unveiled late last week, and the main idea of this change would be to make recommendations all the more visible to users. All that needed to be done was to update the +1 button code, where an inline annotation will appear next to the button.”
Interestingly, the concept is fairly simple and the new annotations is displayed whenever a user hovers over the +1 button. Hovering over it will display a list of friends and contacts that have already clicked the +1 button for that page. Google has also unveiled new code for the +1 button that will display the faces and names of friends that have used the +1 button.
Although the changes are reasonably small, but they will likely make the +1 button even more sticky. However, the search giant will need to do more though to compete with social media giant Facebook’s button, which has become staple on millions of websites as it plays catch up to target more than 750 million users across the globe.
Additionally, Google has also released an update for the code of this button which will provide access to names and pictures of friends who +1’d the post. On activating this updated code, the button will be accompanied with an inline annotation.
By introducing new features for its social networking website, Google appears to be engaging in stronger competition from Facebook. What needs to be seen is whether it can manage to shake the strong foothold that Facebook has created for itself.
Moreover, this novel feature has been introduced to folks using the Google+ Platform Preview, but the rest of us should be seeing it soon as well.