I’ve been testing out, using, and utilizing Google+ now for 5 days.  I’m proud to say that I was in on Google+ on Day 1,  because it’s like being in the ground floor of a building that’s being built around you.  There’s tons of activity, lots of potential, and builders who are actively listening to the ideas and concerns that their new tenants have.  Let me introduce you to the basics first, then I’ll share my overall thoughts.

What is Google+

Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook/Twitter, in a nutshell.  In it, you can divide people into “circles”, share content with them as you see fit, upload photos and video, and communicate with them however you se fit.  Those +1 buttons popping up over the web are being put to good use now, serving as the “like” button that Facebook users are so used to.

The community is still small and intimate at the moment, and there’s lots of great discussions going around.  I’m privileged to see social media superstars like Chris Brogan and Scott Monty dropping by my updates to leave their insight or comments.  Ashton Kutcher is there getting his groove on as always, and even Newt Gingrich is poking around to see what this is all about.  Still, I’ve seen more discussion (legitimate discussion) happening over the last week on topics than I ever did on Twitter or Facebook.

Circles

You share information by categorizing people into “circles” – you can name them whatever you like, and those become the holes in which you fill your content.  You can take the fire-hose of content if you wish, but you can also only consume “friends” or “chess club members” to really dive down to who’s saying what.  It also controls who gets to see the content you produce.  If I put Holly into the “family” circle, and only share the update with her, she’s the only one that sees it.  What happens when Luke and Kieran are old enough to join? We get our own family communication board that no one sees but them.  Pretty cool

Picasa Photos

Anyone who has used Picasa knows what it’s all about.  It’s photo storage.  If you use Google+, you get any photo under 2048×2048 resolution stored free – which isn’t too shabby considering most monitors display up to less than 2000px at the moment.

Hangouts

You can start a video chat with up to 10 people – that’s 4 more than Skype – and open it up to let anyone who wants to jump in and chat.  I see a lot of potential here.

The Bottom Line

Google+ has hit the ground with Hussain Bolt speed.  There’s a lot of stuff going on that has quite a bit of potential, and they’re already doing a LOT of stuff right.  Look for this to get even better as it expands.

By the way… if you’re on, find me whydoncha?

This post is the third of an ongoing series entitled “50 Days to a Better WordPress Blog”.  Over the next 48 days, Mitch will be providing small snippits of code, plugins, and things you can do to make your blog more attractive, attain new readers, and keep old ones coming back time and time again. You can see the entire series here.

There’s no better feeling than putting the last period (or in my case, an exclamation point!) on your blog post.  Knowing that your content is all ready for the world to see is exciting, and we have a tendency to want to blurt out our blog post on Twitter or Facebook as many times as we can to get people in.  But how much is too much?  Is there a “sweet spot” to sharing our own content to our followers?

And what of our readers?  Suppose they want to share your content with their friends and family (that’s the ultimate goal of any writer, for sure).  How can we make it easy for them to get our message out for us?

We’ll tackle the first problem in a bit, but let’s address the latter – making it easy for readers to share our content.  I typically recommend two sharing options when I set up client blogs – one at the top of the post (Digg Digg) and one at the bottom (SexyBookmarks).

Digg Digg

Digg Digg allows you to have bookmarklets for Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, or any of the other major social services with a single click.  It also shows the numbers of readers who have already done so.  If you’ve been to Mashable recently, you’re very familiar with this plugin (or at least the functionality it’s mimicking – the “rail” on the side that follows you down the page can be achieved with this plugin).

If the “rail” isn’t your style, you can simply embed the bookmarklets before or after the main content – and you can chose either the square or narrow rectangle (compact) options.

SexyBookmarks

SexyBookmarks allows you to drop in some really sexy bookmark-looking share icons (hence the name) at the bottom or top of your posts.  I highly recommend putting them at the bottom to drive your readers to share once they’ve finished reading your post.  All of the major services are there, and a lot of minor ones too.

I recommend setting up the “most popular” options as most of the big names are covered, as well as a few interesting ones, namely “PrintFriendly” and “Email/Gmail”.  Just goes to show you that people would still email a post or print it out for later reading as well as sharing it to their social networks.

So, How Much is Too Much?

This debate has been going on since social networks came into the limelight.  People want to share their content, but readers don’t want to be bombarded with links to your site all the time; they want to see that you’re doing other stuff besides blogging (after all, how else would you have stuff to blog about?)

There are a few schools of thought on this, and I encourage you to do your research to see what technique works for you, but I have a lot of luck posting twice a day: Once in the morning (before 11am CST) and once after noon (around 3pm CST).  Those two times seem to bring in the most traffic because the first post hits the people who content surf at work in the morning, while the second post hits people for the “3 o’clock block” and when they get home from work.  I may try posting in the evening to see if I get any more response – if I do, I’ll let you know here, but for now two times a day on the day it’s posted is fairly good.

Also, make sure to balance out content tweets (retweets with links, your own content, etc) with actual conversation – after all, people should know that you don’t sit at home and read links all day – they should see you out doing whatever it is you’re talking about – it makes for a much more real conversation that way).

Now go out there, do something, and talk about it – at the end of the day, isn’t that why we’re blogging in the first place?

Well, I’ve gone and done it – I wrote my first WordPress plugin.  I’m super stoaked on how easy it was, and I may end up doing some more work in the future.

And, for my first number, I tackled the same problem I did in my last post: the new Facebook “like” button.

The way I had inserted was too complicated, and required editing of the core plugin.

Not anymore.

Introducing the “Facebook Like Button” plugin.

Basically, it does one thing, and one thing well: It lets you insert the new Facebook like button either under the content of your blog post, above your comments and other social plugins (bookmarks, etc) or insert it manually via a function/template tag.

Simply activate the plugin and head over to the options menu to control the various options (color scheme, width, height, etc) of the plugin, then sit back and watch as your friends “like” your content.

When a person likes a post, by the way, it ends up in their Recent Activity Stream.

Download Version 1.6 of the Facebook Like Plugin

And, as always, feedback is much, much appreciated

Version 1.6 adds a whole host of options, from height, width, margin, the verbiage, and more.  It makes the process so much easier than just filling in option menus.  Please enjoy!

Changelog:

0.1a – initial release.
0.2a – fixed spacing issue both above and below
1.0: first stable release – added function to add to a template manually (thanks Amber Weinberg!)
1.5 – added the rest of the options FB gives you (minus the button type – I like the faces, and that’s specifically what I designed this plugin to do).
1.6 – for some reason 1.5 couldn’t be downloaded so 1.6 is just a clone to resync the plugin repository.

UPDATE: I managed to write this into a plugin – Facebook Like Button

Since Facebook announced a few days ago that you would be able to use its OpenGraph technology to “like” pretty much anything on the Internet, I took it upon myself to test out a few solutions for adding a “Like” button on the site.

It turned out to be fairly easy, but not as easy as just adding a plugin and doing forth (at least, it’s not yet, anyway).

Our Plan of Action:

1. Download and Install the plugin
2. Editing the core file to allow for correct width and color scheme

Step 1: Downoading the Plugin

I looked through quite a bit of plugins to find this one, and I had to get it from his website because it’s an alpha release, but the Facebook Like Widget does it cleanly and with little fuss.

Step 2: Customizing the Plugin

OK.  Editors note: normally I do not advocate editing the core of a plugin.  Why? Because when you update (and you should!) it will over-write what you did.  However, since this is an alpha release, and I’m almost positive the next changes will allow you easily do these changes, I think once or twice is ok.

You’re going to want to click into Plugins > Editor, and choose the “Facebook Like Widget” plugin from the list.

There’s literally about 20 lines of code:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Facebook Like Widget
Plugin URI: http://allanjosephbatac.com
Description: Add a Facebook ‘Like’ Button Widget to your post pages. Increase visitors!
Author: AJ Batac
Version: 0.1
Author URI: http://allanjosephbatac.com
*/

function add_facebook_like($the_iframe = ”)
{
    $the_perma    = rawurlencode(get_permalink());
    $the_iframe    .= ‘<div id=”facebook_like”><iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=’.$the_perma.’&amp;layout=standard&amp;show-faces=true&amp;width=600&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=dark” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:600px; height:auto;”></iframe></div>’;
    return $the_iframe;
}

add_action(‘the_content’, ‘add_facebook_like’);
?>

The bold, color coded areas above show the areas you can change. The width corresponds to how wide your blog is.  if you don’t know, then just leave it at the default (450px) and you should be OK.  However, your friend’s “faces” won’t go to the edge of your content.  In yellow is the “color scheme”.  If you have a light background, choose “light”.  If you have a darker background, like my site, choose “dark”. 

That’s it – the like badge will show up at the bottom:

And will also show up on your friend’s “Recent Activity” stream:

Keep in mind, this is not the most elegant solution, but until others come, this is a great way to get it on your site quickly and with very little editing.

Normally I’m not one to recycle information on the net (I think that we’ve already become a big enough echo chamber without one other voice being added) but I do like this PDF put out by 14 of the best minds in Social Media.  It’s a great read!

Social Media 2009