The Google +1 button will now actually have a function, the search giant announced Wednesday.

It’s about time.

Prior to launching its social network called Google+, Google seeded the web with +1 buttons on news stories and websites in March, which when pushed … did almost nothing.

All it did was make it so that if you searched on something that one of your friends +1-ed, you’d see that marked next to a search result on Google’s search pages.

For months the button has felt like the useless light switch from the old Steven Wright joke, “In my house there’s this light switch that doesn’t do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany telling me ‘Cut it out.'”

Now Google’s electricians are hooking up the +1 buttons so that they will let Google+ users use it to post content they find interesting to their Google+ account. (Um, does that sound like a “Like” button you might have seen somewhere on the web?)

The feature works mostly like you would expect it to, grabbing an image and a snippet of text from the page or news story, and you can then decide which of your circles to post it to.



Google’s simultaneously giving websites the tools to define which image and what snippet of text to grab.

The feature isn’t live yet, but will be rolling out to all Google+ users in the coming days.

Those who really like the idea can get in on the Plussing action immediately by signing up to be a Google+ feature beta tester.

Of course, the real power of the +1 button — and the potential for its abuse — will be seen when Google wires it up to its search engine’s algorithm to adjust how it ranks sites.

And, like it or not, that’s definitely a when – not an if.