Google is great and powerful, but there are a lot of things that they could do better.
Google gets Social with +1
So they introduced the +1 button.
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Well it is pretty. But will it work? Will it become a project like Google Wave, Google Answers, Google Notebook or even the Google Buzz that never really took off?
Google seems like it doesn’t like to play well with others and they want to be the biggest and best at everything. Not many of my friends have Google accounts, so if I +1 something on the Google Search or on a website, my friends will not see it. My friends would see my likes on Facebook and my Tweets. Your friends might be different.
Google obviously wants more people to have a Google Account, that is fine, but give people a reason. If they don’t need gmail then why would they get a Google Account? If you make it a centralised way to like or share things on the internet, then maybe they would get a Google account.
Would it not be better to integrate it? With what you ask. Well we all have our favourite social network, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or any number of others that have been made or will still be made in the future. So why not make this the button that combines all of these?
Open up the development for this. Allow developers to add social networks or use currently popular ones. Make plugins for WordPress, Joomla and various other popular cms and blogging platforms.
Then when the user visits the site that and they click the +1 button. Then a popup comes up and asks, “Where do you want to +1 this page or search result to?” You can have the option to Like on Facebook, Tweet on Twitter, Ask a Question on Yahoo Answers, Share this on Digg, reddit, or Bookmark on delicious and whatever else you want to have on your website. This could all be controlled by a Google Account.
So how does Google do this?
Well these are my thoughts.
+1 in Google Account.
If you have a Google Account then give the users the option to validate and login to the social networks that they use. You can also allow them to select options for different situations. Like on a search result, I would like to bookmark the page using Google Bookmarks or Delicious. And on websites I might want to like the page on Facebook and Tweet it on Twitter or +1 it on Google.
You could also use the Google url Shortener or maybe even bit.ly and tinyurl. This could also be opened up to use your own url shortner.
+1 on Search Results.
Give the searchers the option to +1 the result. This is will bring up a popup of some sort.
- If they have a Google Account and they have set up preferences then show the options for their preferences. If they want to like the link, then they have already authorised Facebook, so it will just be a click. If they want to bookmark, same story.
- If they don’t have a Google Account then the pop will still come up and allow them to like the link with Facebook, or Tweet with Twitter, if they are logged in to their accounts. And below this could be a small link that says that they can create a Google Account to make this simpler and faster.
- If they want to tweet this to Twitter, then they could pre-fill in the field for the user, with the Article Title and use the Url Shortener for the url and maybe a brief extract from the article. This could be edited if the user wants to.
+1 on Websites
You should be able to allow the web-masters to select what networks they would like to target. If the user has another network that they want to use then allow that too. This would be very similar to the +1 on search links but there could be some other options as well.
- There would be a cumulative total of the total +1′s on the site. When hovered over then it could bring up the breakdown of what has been shared or tweeted about, eg. 56 Facebook Likes; 12 Tweets; 3 bookmarks….
- This would be able to be shown on the Google Search results too.
There are so many good things that Google could do with this. They would then be the first app that gets installed on a new website and they would get more Google Accounts.
But I think that there might be a bigger even more important thing that they could do. Now this might be very controversial, but if Google wants to stay relevant with upstarts like Blekko coming up fast, they need to filter and review their search results. So would they not be able to take this information that is gathered and use that along with their Pagerank and other SEO things and make their results better?
So what do you think? Should Google go down this road or not?
