¶ We had a quick chat in the Clearleft office about the the recently announced Google +1 button. Initially it seems the button will only appear in search results and ads, but the introductory video claims that ‘soon you’ll be able to +1 more than just search results, you’ll also find the +1 button on sites across the web’.
But do we really need another ‘like’ button? My initial thinking was no, and that opinion hasn’t changed yet. Google might have some interesting plans for the data they receive – it may well feed into GoogleRank for a start. Essentially though, this just seems like another attempt by Google to move into the ‘social web’ space and grab some of Facebook’s territory. They’ve failed miserably so far, and I can’t see this helping.
Josh noted that it’s understandable for Google to gather yet more data – it’s their business model and it’s worked well for them so far: knowledge is power. But do we want to give Google more data? There’s an understandable fear around a company having so much influence, but what evil can they inflict once they know what we ‘like’? Perhaps it’s an irrational fear, but it’s good to be cautious when it comes to monopolies.
Harry pointed our that what matters is not the recommendation data itself but who gets to see it. With Facebook, when you ‘like’ something, your recommendation can be seen by your Facebook friends. Let’s think about that for a minute – your Facebook social graph is something you have lovingly curated over many years. Facebook have tried they damnedest to make sure you’ve put in a ridiculous number of hours growing, preening and pruning your friend list. This is why Facebook relatively ‘likes’ are high value.
With Google, your social graph is not something you have personally curated. In typical Google style, they’ve tried to automate the process of social graph creation by mining publicly available friend data on the web – like your Twitter follows and followers – together with the various bits of contact information you have stored within your Google account. If you’re a big Twitter user, a blogger and you use your Google account a lot, then Google’s automated approach will probably work quite well for you right out the gate. But will it work well for normal humans? If Average Joe sees a load of +1s from people he doesn’t care about, it’s just noise. And if he doesn’t see enough +1s, it’s just not useful. And at least with Facebook, he can instantly remedy either issue. With Google, what can he do – sit and wait?
Which is pretty much what we’ll have to do now – sit and wait to see how much traction this gets, and what Google decides to do with the data. As Josh said above (and many people before him) knowledge is power. And so is data, if you’re Google.
Comments
1
With so many social media sites and tools – I thing this +1 by Google is nothing but a PR campaign specially after Google and Bing declared that they value the activities/performance of a site on SM sites like twitter and Facebook!
2
Google is a real late entrant in implementing social media constructs. Yes its just another like button that we really don’t need.
And if they plan to use this data to rank sites, god help em. Its childs play for black hat SEO coders to vote sites up with a few well coded bots.
What I recon is that they will use this data to serve up more targeted adwords ads
3
I am not concerned about the +1 button enabling them to do any evil, but I don’t think it will be that useful for normal users.
4
I only think its worth playing ball with anything Google introduces purely because this data can be factored into their algorithms and affect the ranking of your own and/or clients websites.
I agree that we probably don’t need another ‘social popularity tool’ and find it ridiculous how many are competing for this now but social optimisation is the current trend right now.
Be interesting to see if it takes off / lasts – Wave, Buzz, now +1 :/
5
I think google is a little late in this idea; they have admitted that they missed the boat and seem to be doing a PR stunt to play catch up. Does it actually do anything for SEO or is it just aesthetic?
6
With all these submission links available, does anyone know how useful they really are for your website? Facebook and Twitter seem more useful as they are genuine, personal attempts to give people you know something interesting, and this seems the best approach to both marketing and social media. Personally I’d have more faith in Google that this is something that will prove genuinely useful (at some point) but will be interested to see how that pans out.
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