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Another benefit is possibly shorter URLs. But I prefer the normal approach of example.com/sector/sub-sector/productpage.

Think they are only referring to the +1 badges which by default are on SERPS. The Google+ badge doesn't appear to have a presence (at least on the searches I've made). Google badges should be crawled as a rich snippet in my opinion - I had thought they were but now not so sure.

Thanks Tom. I got your e-mail. It says "full" at the moment but it looks like you will be very popular on Google with lots of new friends

This is a great idea. Probably gonna use it