How to invite your friends to Google+

Yesterday, Google launched its Facebook competitor - The Google+ Project, which at the moment is under Field Trail (by invite only). For the pass 12 hours I had see a lot of people already starting to gain access to the platform & a huge thank you to @kitty_cheung whom send me an invite, hence I got the access to this nice playground.

I'm going have another post about the review of Google+ mean while main purpose of this post is to show you a quick way to invite your friends to Google+ so more people can try out this wonderful tool.

At the moment, Google had disabled the invitation link from Google+ however there is an alternative way to invite your friends to Google+

It's easy! Simply create a new stream and share it with your friends by keying in their Gmail address then an email will be sent to your friend with the stream you just share & a BIG orange box saying "Learn more about Google+", once your friend clicked on that box they will be in Google+ in no time! **Do check your junk mail folder thou, sometime it's possible will be categorize as junk!


the24 tech news create a nice video to showcase this how to.

Enjoy the great social platform from Google and let us know your experience!
In addition, we are also interest to know what's your thought on Google+ , if you can fill in the poll below for us, that will be greatly appreciate!



Update: Looks like Google has closed off invites after just a few hours. Guess users will have to wait for the next wave of invites to come

Update2: TNW show us a quick work around for invite. Simply create a circle & add those friends whom you would like to invite, then share a stream with he entire circle then those users will get an email to ask them to join Google+.  So far it works like a charm!

Update3: Invite mechanism and workarounds have been shutdown because of excessive demand

Update 4: As for the past few days Google has released more invites am now able to share these invites out. If you do want an invite, simply follow @mark_shu and send me a DM together with your gmail. DO NOT post your email on comments section 

Update 5: Google rolled out a new model of inviting friends to Google+, simply click here to get sign up Google+ if you yet to be in the fun circle.

How to integrate Google +1 button with AddThis

Earlier in Mach, Google rolled out their own share button - Google +1 button, however the button appearance only limited to search results that's returning from Google.com but not localize search results. Yesterday Google rolled out the new +1 button, in addition a guide of how to implement the button to your web site was also released in Google code site.

I had always been using AddThis as my social media sharing gadget and am happy that they are partner up with Google to support the implementation of the +1 button. At the beginning it looks like the implementation of the +1 button to my blog should be an easy one, however there are a few catches you will need to watch out. If you are seeking to integrate +1 button using addthis service, this is for you.

**Important note** According to addthis service, this new button is not currently support for IE browser, will eventually fully supported in IE8+ and for non support browser, it will show an empty space.

Code that was originally provided by AddThis looks simple and easy, adding the code below should add the new button to your addthis button collection.

<a class="addthis_button_google_plusone"></a>

However once I placed the above code to my blog, I found out the button is not displaying.

A quick Google search let me know that quite a few people are experiencing the same problem and the root cause of the problem is related to the meta generator tag that is not functioning. There is a quick fix you can apply, adding the plusone.js before the top of your page and have it site before the </head> and you will be in good hands

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

From time to time, user may want to customize their button and within the addthis documentation I was not able to find any documentation regarding on customizing the button either.

Google +1 button do allow customization like button size, with or without counter, set language, etc. but how to modified these settings using addthis service?

Next stop, the +1 button API site. Within the API site there are description of the settings that can be applied to +1 button. Common settings like button size, set counter, counter settings (vertical and horizontal positioning) are all described within the site. A quick trail and error allow me to learn that these settings are able to apply to the addthis button settings.

For example if you want to modified the button size to medium and have no counter, simply apply the code below to the addthis button block

<a class='addthis_button_google_plusone' g:plusone:size='medium' g:plusone:count='false'/>

g:plusone is referring to the +1 button in addthis, by appending : with the properties from the API you will get the settings you want.

Above I simply set the button size to medium by using g:plusone:size='medium' & using g:plusone:count='false' to set no counter to my +1 button. give it a try and see how it goes!

Happy Sharing!