Google News Badges: Level Up As You Read The News

Bored with the standard news reading experience?

Google News is now giving out news topic badges to their readers based on reading activity. Announcing the service, Google Engineer Natasha Mohanty writes, "The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate."

Why should you care about earning a badge from Google?

Google offers three main reasons in their introductory video. You can track your reading interests, personalize your Google News reading experience, and share your reading interests with friends.

Google previously offered automatic personalization in Google News based on reading habits. Badges now serve as a virtual artifact to help readers understand and make better use of this personalization.

The social component of badges doesn't appear to be integrated with Google's new social network Google Plus. But, in the introductory blog post, Mohanty writes, "This is just the first step - the bronze release, if you will - of Google News badges."

Google started using badges on their Orkut social network in November 2010. They've not revealed any plans for badges on Google Plus.

Google's badges are part of a broader trend among tech companies to apply game mechanics to improve the user experience of websites and applications. Kongregate, Foursquare, StackOverflow, the Huffington Post, and many other tech companies have used badges as a part of their service.

Read more about the badges on the Google Blog announcement or view the video below.

Comments

[theveggiedude]

05:01 PM on 07/15/2011

It's another data collection scheme. The algorithm will become so advanced, it will ultimately know what you think before you think it. Clever.

[Lia Bia]

02:39 PM on 07/15/2011

So... Google has just taken another thing from another social media and glued it to themselves... innovative. *snore.

[nohopepope2187]

02:38 AM on 07/15/2011

"The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate."
----
READ: The more you randomly click on links the shinier your button gets.

[arkymorgan]

12:24 AM on 07/15/2011

Gosh. How innovative! I wonder why HuffPost nev- - oh, well, looky here!

[bluejoni2525]

08:56 PM on 07/14/2011

NO Not more badges !!!

[Dan Schell]

08:40 PM on 07/14/2011

"Badges? I don't need no stinking badges!"