Mike's already picked up on the +1s bleeding through.

We have an open bug on choosing a URL from the body text. Another possible solution -- allow posts with links to use full-bleed photos.

Originally shared by Mike Elgan

How Google+ could improve viral G+ marketing for free.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ is a great blogging platform.

Let's say you want to blog about another post somewhere. If you paste in the link, or click on the link icon, Google+ will add a thumbnail from the external post, plus a blurb.

But this is ugly. Some of the highest-traffic bloggers on Google+ don't use that system, including me. What we do instead is add a big, appealing photograph, the paste in the link in the body of the post.

The first method links plus-ones on the other post. In other words, when someone plus-ones a post on Google+, the original source plus-one count goes up by one. It's linked forever. If the same user comes back and un-does his plus-one, the count on the source site goes down by one.

However, if you do the big-picture method, plus-ones on Google+ are not reflected on the external post -- the plus-ones are not linked.

Here's an example of the problem: Yesterday I posted an item on Cult of Mac using the big-picture method. The post and its comments got well over 2,000 plus-ones. But over on the Cult of Mac site, the post got only 76 plus-ones.

https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/posts/B9VLptUGikF

People always mentally compare the Facebook "Like" count with the Google+ "plus-one" count and Google+ often looks like a slacker. But the reason is that likes for the the big-picture posts on Google+ aren't counted.

If Google+ had counted the "plus-ones" for my post, for example, the G+ count would have been much higher than the Facebook count, and people viewing the source page would have a more accurate comparison between Facebook and Google+.

Here's my proposed solution.

When a user pastes in a URL in Google+, and the system auto-generates the thumbnail-and-blurb thing and links the plus-ones of the two posts, the user should have the option of replacing the thumbnail-and-blurb without de-coupling the linked plus-ones.

That way, bloggers like me could use big-picture blog posts and still have plus-ones reflected on the source page.

Is this possible or desirable?

#gplus