Google have quietly made an improvement to their +1 Button. For those that do not know what the +1 button is it works in a very similar way to a Facebook Like button. When you are on a page that you like, and you have a Google account, then you can +1 the button (assuming that it is present) to say that you are voting for this page to say that the information on it is useful.

The improvement that Google have made to the +1 button is that now you can see annotations about which of your other Google friends have liked a page when you hover your mouse over the +1 button. This means that the +1 button becomes more social than it was before.

This at first sight seems to be a very minor change but is likely to help increase the use of the +1 button on websites. If the +1 button starts to gain more traction on the web then it is also likely to help increase the uptake to Google+ as well.

This is just another step towards Larry Page’s vision for Google to become more of a social company. Google are probably going to build more social signals into their search algorithm so that we, the users of the web, have a greater say in what the highest ranked sites are in organic results. It does make sense to use the pages that your friends have +1ed appearing higher in SERP’s than they would possibly have done otherwise asy our friends generally have the same interests as yo and so the pages that they like on the Net are likely to also be popular with yourself. It’s a win-win for Google and their users.

I have already updated the code for the +1 button on my site. You would need to do the same to take advantage of this feature. You can get a Google +1 button from this Google Webpage. If you are not sure how to do this then feel free to drop me a line on my contact page and I will do my best to help you out.