Also check out http://gitforked.com/

I made it earlier this year, but didn't get the HN love :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279450

Both bottons look elegant. Probably your botton was posted at a wrong time of a day. That's why I've made an app that tells you when it's good time to post a story. Today 9am, a lot of newest stories were upvoted quickly - biggest peak in over two weeks.

It would be nice if clicking the button made you a watcher.

I think the reason for the difference is this one was so simple. From the title, I knew what it was going to be. With yours it was a little over complicated. From the title of HN post, to the website

One problem I see with this: Some people are going to see buttons that are identical in style to Twitter follow buttons, and assume that clicking it will "Watch" the repo.

For some subset of the population, they'll either not notice they didn't actually Watch the repo (and hence be a lost Watcher for your project), or they'll notice, be annoyed, and assume its a bug.

I actually thought they did that, until you wrote that comment.

All this does is statically link the user to the GitHub page. It does not actually "Watch" the repo when you hit Watch. While nice, it's just a glorified link. The counter is the only real feature here.

I really wish github would develop a web intents api like Twitter. Then one can watch repos and follow other users much like the follow bottons for twitter.

If you want to see how many watchers/forks a project has, it's easy enough to pull down the data yourself:

  mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s https://github.com/mikecardwell/gpgit|grep -A 1 ' title="Watchers" '|tail -1
              10
  mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s https://github.com/mikecardwell/gpgit|grep -A 1 ' title="Forks" '|tail -1
              2
  mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ 

Then you can use a locally hosted image and embed the counters in your own content. We're only talking a couple of lines of code here.

I love that the website looks like a face.

The eyes are the watch and fork buttons, the nose is the download on github and it has a little mustache being the bottom watch and fork buttons. Also the hair seems to be the "GitHub Buttons"-Text. Hopefully that's not just me :D

It's worth mentioning 'css3buttons' project which does the same thing in a really elegent way.

https://github.com/michenriksen/css3buttons

Another similar project: http://octophile.com

It is for followers only, but clicking the button will follow the user like Twitter's follow button does