If you have the Google +1 button on your website – or indeed if you have visited any website that features it in recent times – you may have noticed that it used to be rather slow to appear.
However that has all changed now, thanks to Google’s efforts to improve the relatively new +1 service. The button appears as a small rectangular box with +1 inside it. It is easy to recognise because the top of the rectangle contains the four colours Google is known for – red, blue, green and yellow, in that order. Now whenever you load a web page with the +1 button on it, it will appear three times as quickly as it did before.
The update has only been announced in the last day or so, which means that it may take a few days to be rolled out completely. If you still get slow rendering at the moment it should change very soon, so that it loads just as quickly as the rest of any web page it appears on.
The good news – apart from the faster loading itself of course – is that anyone who features the Google +1 button on their website doesn’t have to do anything to get the faster service. Everything is done by Google and all the webmaster has to do is sit back and wait for the faster service to arrive.
It is a nice tweak from Google, and perhaps one that is overdue.
