Today, I received an email from Google+ Platform Preview group saying to announce inline annotation.

Since the launch of the +1 Button, it’s been great to see recommendations from friends and family in search results. Now Google is making the +1 Button more social with the addition of friend annotations.

Google Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan said in that email, you may have already noticed faces and names when you hover over a +1 button.  This change rolled out late last week. Now, you can make these recommendations even more visible to your users.  Simply update the +1 button code, and an inline annotation will show next to the button.

New feature is making it easy for users to see recommendations from people they trust. The new annotations appear when a user hovers over the +1 button. Hovering over it will display a list of friends and contacts that have already clicked the +1 button for that page.

Roll out of the new friend annotations feature will be available to all users soon, but If you’d like to start test drive the inline annotation right away, join the Google+ Platform Preview group and generate a new snippet on the +1 button configuration tool.

New features will likely make the +1 button even more sticky, though the changes are small. The search giant will need to do more though to compete with Facebook’s button, which has become standard on millions of websites across the world.