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Google News has announced they are now in the achievements and badge award game! Yay!
Google News will now unlock badges for reading news on Google News. The more you read, the more diverse your reading, the more badges you are awarded. Plus, the more you read on a topic, the higher level badge you'll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate.
Here is a video demo explaining how it works:
When I went to Google News I was prompted with this welcome section:
As I started clicking on my Apple fan boy news, I saw an Apple badge appear on the right hand side:
So I then began clicking on other news, but the other badges didn't show up yet.
Anyway, I don't think this is a good move. I'll predict that the badges are gone within the year.
One neat feature is the ability to customize your news more with sliders. Google began with this type of feature by giving you the ability to hide sources. But now you can tone up or down the news you see on Google News home page with sliders:
I think that is a good idea, not the news badges.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
Comments:
Eitjuh
07/15/2011 01:42 pm
I actually like the badges. It isn't really useful but I like the fact of being rewarded with something for just reading news :).
Deanna@MainStreetHost
07/15/2011 02:24 pm
Whatever happened to reading just for the sake of reading, or to stay informed? Should we really be rewarded for this? Shouldn't it just be something we do? On the other hand, something like this could convince more people to pay attention to the news. We'll see I guess.
Dan Whitehouse
07/15/2011 04:30 pm
It seems like another personalisation is on the way. Slight rip off from FourSquare, but I'm sure they can make it work.
Michael Martinez
07/15/2011 06:48 pm
Welcome to the Google News Scouts, pilgrim!
BALU
07/17/2011 11:27 am
Learnt something new on google badges
Mark Anthony Cianfrani
07/18/2011 07:12 pm
I actually wrote more into this on my blog, but in essence I feel that there's more than meets the eye with these badges. They give us a little something more to measure a person's credibility. If you have a badge showing you've read over 500,000 Apple articles, then you obviously are bound to know SOMETHING. Google's also been pretty clear that you can't just farm these and click 500,000 articles in one day (I've tried). So that makes the value of them a little bit more. Not only that, but its a great way to get people to turn on their Web History.