I think it’s fairly safe to say that when we see a “Like” button on the Web, we almost instantly associate it with liking something on Facebook, at least I know that I do.

Two years ago, WordPress.com launched its own “Like system”, which allowed readers to like something that they read, which would then add their gravatar to a cluster of other people that liked it, too. When it was announced, the company said that it hoped the feature would drive people to explore other blogs and bloggers.

It seems that users liked the idea, because WordPress.com has posted some of its recent success with the system, as well as some new enhancements.

According to the graph below, the traction of the feature has picked up since its launch, seeing well over 800,000 clicks a week:

While those number might not seem overwhelmingly huge, the growth is definitely a good thing and shows that Facebook might not own the “Like” after-all. Either that, or all of the users clicking the button are assuming that it’s related to Facebook, even though WordPress.com blogs have a share button for the service. Confused? Don’t be.

In what seems to be a push to turn WordPress.com into more of a social network, the company announced that it has added the option to put the buttons on all of your content, instead of on each individual blog post like before.

By editing your Like button options, you can allow people to click the button on your home page, blog posts, and individual pictures within slideshows. Here’s what the button looks like on a front page of a WordPress.com blog, which now lets you click the Like button without having to drill into the content:

Since liking posts can be a way to bookmark items for yourself and to show off on a profile, your interactions will now show up on your profile page under “Posts I Like”:

So go forth and get your Like on, but don’t expect it to show up on Facebook. You’ll have to click the share button for that.

Today, the Google Earth team announced some improvements for its latest version of the the service, 6.2. With the update comes some visual enhancements as well as some social ones thanks to Google+ integration.

Here’s what the team had to say today about Google Earth 6.2:

We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+.

The visual updates are quite dramatic as you can see in the below screenshot of a before and after of the Grand Canyon (after being on the right hand side):

Since Google Earth is made up of multiple satellite images, what you see on the app can sometimes appear to be patchy, since it’s comprised of stitched together photos. The team has said it solved that with its latest version by smoothing out the seams between photos. It’s really impressive stuff.

Along with the prettier still photos of locations on Google Earth, the team has done what every other Google property is working on doing, and that’s integrating its social network Google+.

When you are searching for locations on the app, you can then share those screenshots on Google+ in just a few clicks:

After you click share, you’ll be presented with the familiar Google+ dialog that asks you which circles you’d like to share with. It’s a nice way to share landmarks that you’ve visited or start conversation about places you’d like to go.

Depending on what type of machine you’re running, Google Earth can be a bit of a resource hog, considering that it’s zooming in close to any location you search on. To help you with searching, Google Earth now has autocomplete much like Google’s search engine does now. That will help you find locations easier and skip the headache of spelling streets or venues incorrectly.

The march to socialize all Google products continues under its latest CEO Larry Page, who recently announced that Google+ had hit 90 million users.

➤ Google Earth 6.2

As you know, there is no quick way to share Google+ posts on any other social network. It’s the type of feature that used to drive traffic back to popular conversation engine FriendFeed before it was purchased by Facebook.

In the same way that FriendFeed was a great place to have a full cohesive conversation, Google+ lets you chat with people in real-time without being as fractured and incoherently assembled of an experience as replying to people on Twitter can be.

What Google+ lacks in features, third-party developers are more than making up for with extensions and add-ons for Google’s web browser, Chrome.

One handy Chrome extension is called Extended Share for Google Plus, and it does exactly what it sounds like it does.

Bat signal +

Starting a conversation on Google+ and sharing that link on other social networks is kind of like sending a bat signal out to your friends and followers, asking them to come to a place where “chatting” is better supported.

When you install this Google+ Chrome Extension, you’ll notice that a new “Share On” button pops up next to the existing share button that simply lets you share someone’s Google+ post on your stream.

Now you can send out any Google+ post link to a slew of services including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon. The preferences for Extended Share let you choose the services you’d like to see show up when you click “Share On” within Google+.

While sharing Google+ links could annoy your Facebook and Twitter friends, it is quite useful if you’re really looking to generate a worthwhile discussion about the topic you’ve posted about. I’ve found that Google+ beats out most services for group conversations, and while the comment system isn’t threaded like it should be, it’s extremely easy to follow a real-time conversation on the service.

While this is a feature that the Google+ team could easily integrate into the service, it’s best left to third-party developers to figure out what services should be included in such a sharing list.

➤ Extended Share for Google Plus

It’s easy to do. Just click each feather and you’ll be given different options for your doodle. Keep clicking around until you’re happy with your turkey, and then click share.

Here’s a custom gobbler from Google CEO Larry Page:

Who says the top executives don’t use their own services?

This is yet another sign that Google is all-in with its social network Google+. Driving traffic to the platform from its highly trafficked search homepage is an advantage that the company has over competitors like Facebook and Twitter.

PROTURKEYTIP: If you click a particular feather on the Turkey, a completely randomized Doodle will be made for you.

Google has announced the launch of Google Music today, along with major partners including EMI, Universal, and Sony Entertainment.

One of the features announced today was that music you purchase on Google Music can be easily shared from the web interface on Google+.

The key is that your friends and followers on Google+ will be able to listen to the entire song or album that you’ve shared. On services like Apple’s Ping, they can only listen to 30 second previews. The full play is free, Google says.

Google Music will soon have 13 million tracks available for purchase, while 8 million are live now.

The feature works in the existing Google+ iOS app without any updates or downloads.

Clearly this is a product release to combat Facebook’s recent partnership with music streaming service Spotify, although you still have to purchase music from Google Music, rather than pay to stream like you do on Rdio and Spotify.

Being able to share tracks on Google+ is a huge feature, and will spark ideas on new circles to create, for people that like certain genre’s of music.

Glympse, a unique location sharing app announced today that the Android version of its app has been downloaded over one million times. This is a huge milestone for the service, that also offers iOS, Windows Phone, and Blackberry version.

Regarding the milestone, Glympse Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Trussel had this to say:

We’re thrilled that our Android install base has grown over 400 percent in less than a year. It’s a testament to the value users see in our simple and safe approach to location sharing.

The Glympse app allows you to share your real-time location to friends and family for short periods of time. For example, you could send a Glympse alert to your wife to let her know that you’re on your way home. She could then track your movement on a map in real-time from an app or on the web.

It’s not as creepy as it first sounds, it’s actually quite useful if someone wants to ask you to pick up something from a nearby store and sees you’re nowhere near it.

The app doesn’t care about “what” you’re doing, but focuses on the “where”. There aren’t any check-ins or badges with the app, just simple sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

The Android Market has taken a long time to even compare to Apple’s App Store, but numbers like this show developers that if they haven’t ported their iOS app for Android yet, it might be time now. On any platform, 750,000 downloads in less than a year is huge.

In June, the company announced that it raised a $7.5 million series B round, and that it had crossed the one million user barrier.

➤ Glympse

If you’re a Karaoke fan, you know that there’s no feeling like belting out the words to your favorite song as a huge audience watches. Well, maybe a small audience at a bar.

Regardless of the audience, singing is something that’s just fun to do, even if you’re not the best at it. Red Karaoke, an iOS app, wants to let you sing your favorite songs while recording the performance to share with a community of other karaoke lovers who will judge you on said performance.

The app boasts over 45,000 songs in its library, with plenty of them available for free. The app itself costs nothing, but if you’d like access to VIP content, you can pay $8.99 a month. Not having to purchase songs one by one is awesome in and of itself.

Sing like nobody is listening

As soon as you get your account setup, you can start looking for your favorite song. There are a lot of familiar hits here, 45,000 to be exact. Red Karaoke will display songs by free or VIP, genre, and most importantly, by popularity. As of publish time, the top song on Red Karaoke is “Rolling In The Deep” by Adele. It’s a free song, so you should have a go at it. Popular songs definitely cause me to choose them because it makes me more competitive.

Once you’ve chosen your song, you can choose to have your device’s camera recording or not, as well as switch up the tune to make things sound as perfect as they can be. Again, you don’t need to be a professional singer to love karaoke.

The song queues up and you’re shown the lyrics. The colors change on the lyrics to show you what you should be singing, just like a real karaoke bar would have on a big TV display.

It’s kind of like American Idol

In a way, performing a song on Red Karaoke is like being on stage for American Idol. Once you are finished singing, you have a choice to upload the performance or not, and allow the community to vote on it.

Most popular songs are displayed by ranking, and it’s a great way to discover other people’s performances. You can rank the performances and leave comments, making friends with other people in the karaoke community.

Unfortunately, the performances that you’re most proud of are trapped inside of the Red Karaoke app. Sharing on Twitter and Facebook with landing pages and embedded media is a must have for this app. It’s sad that the developers decided not to do this, as I would get way more usage out of it, if I could share to people not using the app. At the very least, an upload to YouTube feature would be handy.

If you like performing, and you’re a fan of karaoke, download Red Karaoke and get your friends on it too. You don’t have to sing, you can serve as a resident judge. Maybe a record label will find the next big star on the platform.

Scanning documents without a scanner isn’t an easy thing to do. Sure, you can take a picture of a receipt to hand in at work, but is it readable and sharable?

DocScan for iOS will turn photos you’ve already taken or new ones, and turn them into a worthwhile and professional scan in PDF format.

It’s a really slick app, and is a must have for road warriors who have to track every last receipt while on business trips. It’s also quite useful if you have a stack full of receipts on your desk like I do.

Scanning a Doc

While you don’t lay the document down on top of a device like you would with a scanner, simply point and shoot with your camera, and the DocScan app will zero in on the area where it finds text. You’re given the opportunity to change the crop area of the photo if you like, but I found it to be spot on.

After the part of the document that you want to save is grabbed, you can change the brightness or hue to make sure it’s both readable and presentable.

Storing your docs

Once you’ve scanned your image, you can then save it as a PDF with DocScan. Saving them items lets you easily bring them back up again to email, upload to Google Docs, or post on Facebook. The easy upload to Google Docs feature alone makes DocScan worth the download.

The scans don’t always come out picture perfect with DocScan though, so be sure to make your area well-lit, and I suggest photographing a document from above. Luckily, more often than not, DocScan finds the scannable text area and makes a great scan on the fly.

One of the funnest things to do on the internet is share an animated .gif file. It’s faster than making someone watch a video clip, and it’s a great way to express yourself. For the most part, the same stale animated gifs make the rounds, ranging from cats falling off of chairs to clips from famous movies.

GifBoom wants you to be able to make your own animated gifs and share them easily. The app for iOS was developed by the company Tapmojo, and is a Tumblr users new best friend. The app is free to download.

Creating an animated gif

Creation is simple with GifBoom. You can choose to use pictures or videos already on your camera roll to piece together a seamless animated graphic. Alternatively you can take new pictures to make your animation, and the app will automatically take photos every second for 20 seconds.

Once your 20 seconds are up, you can choose which frames to included in your animation and then your animated gif is complete. You can even choose filter effects and backgrounds, as well as the frame rate to control how fast the animated gifs display. It will end up looking something like this:

Sharing your animated gif

This is where GifBoom shines. You can share your creation via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, via MMS, or just email the link. Unfortunately, we’ll have to manually share a link or upload direct to Google+, since the service doesn’t have write-enabled APIs as of yet. GifBoom is also very social in a way that Instagram is. There is a stream of popular gifs, as well as recently created ones. You can “like” a gif or leave a comment, much like you can on Instagram.

Animated gifs are certainly a niche interest, but are very popular on sites like Tumblr. With the GifBoom app, it’s really simple to create the animations but it remains to be seen if animated gifs can get anywhere near as popular as photo or video sharing.

Other apps that have similar features are Picflick, but it lacks the social aspect of GifBoom and costs .99 cents.

Streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora are all the rage. Amongst some circles, months have gone by since they have purchased and downloaded 99 cent songs from Apple’s iTunes.

More than likely you still have iTunes music from over the years, and the Reprise app for iOS makes it fun to play and share them again. It actually does a better job than iTunes itself, and has more interesting and seamless features than Apple’s attempt at a social network, Ping.

Reprise is simple to use, and gorgeously designed by developer Adam Bell. The app is $1.99 and completely worth it if you’ve invested hundreds of dollars into purchasing tracks from iTunes.

Playback and Playlists

Creating playlists and queues is simple to do with Reprise. All of the music tracks that you’ve purchased and downloaded on your device show up in Reprise with cover art, and with a simple tap of a track you’ve added it to your queue. If your headphones pop out, Reprise will even fade the music out for you.

Playback controls are simple too, and with a well-defined shuffle “swipe button”, you can move between tracks easily. Holding your finger on a track lets you use a jog wheel for scrubbing through a song that a lot of us remember with the older iPods. Shake to shuffle, Remote control and Airplay support are nice additions here, which helps make Reprise a perfect replacement for the boring Apple iPod app.

With a feature Reprise calls “Perfect Shuffling”, the app promises to never play the same track twice, making sure that you hear all fresh songs while you’re out running, or sitting and relaxing with your device.

Sharing Tracks

Swiping down from a playlist will focus in on the track that’s currently playing. All you have to do is hold your finger on the track, and the sharing controls will show up. You can tweet a track to Twitter or scrobble the track to Last.fm with a few taps.

I’m not sure that I’d get this app specifically for sharing the music you’re listening to, as Spotify has an amazing interface to share tracks to Facebook and Twitter, but having the option is nice. Apple doesn’t give you that option in the existing Music app on iOS.

Obviously, iTunes is doing rather well for Apple and for artists, so having options to native Apple apps is always nice to see. After spending just 5 minutes with Reprise, I became more interested in my purchased iTunes library, simply because of the elegance of the app and the simple controls. Apple’s iTunes just feels dry to me.