The +1 button on Web sites has been hit four billion times, according to a blog post today by Google Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra.

In July, the +1 button crossed 2 billion daily views. In addition, the +1 button is now on more than a million sites.

New features are on the way.

Gundotra:

We’re rolling out sharing and +snippets globally over the next week, but if you’d like to try the new +1 button now, you can join our Google+ Platform Preview. Once you’re part of the Preview, just visit a site with the +1 button (like Rotten Tomatoes) and +1 the page. Thanks for all of your feedback so far, and stay tuned for more features in the weeks and months ahead!

That’s a lot of momentum for a nascent social network and points to why social business is a mega trend of our time.

Services Angle

Why? It’s the new way to communicate, that’s why. Sharing links, building intelligence and using the singular notifications for incremental learning. Now what the CIO needs to know is pretty clearly laid out in a post on Cloud Ave., by Krishnan Subramanian.

It’s all about context. The notifications have a micro type of value but the aggregate, filtered through analytics engines, gives the context that people really need. For isn’t profits what the CIO cares about most of all? That’s what the CFO wants. That’s what everyone wants inside a corporation. A business with free flowing, contextual information is well-documented for making organizations more successful.

So that’s why news like this is of interest. It’s not just another social media story. It’s about a new mega trend. No one goes untouched.