More and more the friendships that already existed offline is being now made online also, and sometimes the online friends seem "closer to our heart" than the friends we physically meet and hang out with.
Just as we do things to protect or to help our friends offline, so we can do some things that can help and protect our friends online!
Recently I discovered that one very simple way to show how much you care for your friends online is by using the Google +1 button!
Note: Google plus has been discontinued by google; this article refers to a social network that no longer exists.
More and more websites allow you to "+1" the articles / pages on their website! What does the +1 mean, how does it help you, and how is a google +1 different / BETTER than a Facebook Like on a page or an article?
Do You Care For Your Friends Online?
+1 is a secret weapon from Google, who have lost a deal with twitter and Facebook never even considered opening their walls for Google to crawl.Google therefore invented their own "social network" and its own way of collecting signals from people who use Google - the +1 button, which can be used either from a website, from youtube, or straight from the google search results!
When you find a good article and you +1 it, when you Plus One an article you like online, it is NOT ONLY being copied to your profile in Google+ but it is also being recommended to the ones in your google+ circles!
In this way you basically recommend an article which you like - to all your Google+ circles, the ones who added you back! This is pretty good!
It has the downside of some people "spamming their friends with a lot of +1", but it has the upside that you will see what your friends are recommending you and what are their reading on the topic you search!
If you're searching for "energy-saving light bulbs" or maybe "LED technology", you will see what your friends read and +1'ed...
Note: this works only if you're logged into your gmail account on the same browser you do your searches. Which, to be honest, everyone does: everyone is logged into their google account when they search for stuff!
Plus One the Good Articles!
If you consider that a certain article is good, if you like that article, you don't have to "send an email with a link to the article to your friends" anymore: you can just +1 that article and your friends will see it! It will be saved in your "+1 list" and your friends will have it up in the results at the top when they search for similar results. Try it!Many of our searches online have resulted in visiting the links that our friends on Google+ have visited and recommended!
Therefore, we would like to recommend YOU also to +1 the good articles, be it on our blog here or on other websites, so that your friends would benefit of the quality articles you're reading and consider useful!
