You know the Facebook likes and the Facebook share buttons.
Google just rolled out +1 buttons similar to likes and Facebook share.
Google was forced into doing this because the damage they would have to withstand when Facebook rolls out the likes for social search could be immense. So i am not going to applaud Google for something that they could have done a long time ago. Especially since Google user numbers are larger than Facebooks across all their websites like Youtube, Gmail, Picasa etc.
There are two ways to give likes or +1s. One is on the search results directly on the Google search or on the sites themselves if they have the button included.
To include the button on your own website or blog all you have to do is go to Google Webmaster Central.
+1s might actually solve the big problem of Google Spam. Where so many sites pop up on Google search that just don’t deliver quality information. One of them being all these E-book websites that talk about a topic but keep the information hidden until you subscribe and then buy their ebook. I am not against ebooks and buying them but i feel these websites use deceptive techniques to get high on google ranking instead of going to an ebook agregator that lets you vote on ebooks for example.
Google Webmaster Central offers analytics on your +1 performance. I think this is an excellent way to gain webmasters approval on +1. But its not something that Google invented. They were forced to do this as pretty much every service (Facebook also) offers analytics on your pages.
