Google is making the +1 Button more social with the addition of friend annotations.
“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 change rolled out late last week. Now, you can make these recommendations even more visible to your users. Simply update the +1 button code, and an inline annotation will show next to the button.”
The new annotations appear when 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. This feature works much like how the Facebook Like Button appears for Mashable stories, displaying how many people have +1′d the page and which friends have +1ed it.
The changes are small, but they will likely make the +1 button even more sticky. The search giant will need to do more though to compete with Facebook’s button, which has become standard on millions of websitesacross the world.
