The benefits of the plugin are:
- The button is animated (the same animation can be seen on any Google search page and currently not available)
- Privacy! A user has to opt in (via hover) to enable the button
- The minified plugin is small (~2kb) and contains the default assets encoded in base64 to reduce http requests. This means that when a user visits a page with multiple +1 buttons on, all buttons will load immedieaty and removes the noticable lag / flicker of assets being loaded that is currently seen with the code from Google.
Check out the source on Github: https://github.com/laurencedawson/jQuery.googlePlusOne.js
A live demo can be viewed at: http://laurencedawson.github.com/jQuery.googlePlusOne.js
Thanks!