Google News gamified for readers – the games afoot

by deep on July 15th, 2011 1

Gamification!!! Yes that’s the right word to describe the recent steps taken by Google, to make reading news more interesting and more social.

Reading news is the most fundamental ‘social’ activity on the Internet than anything else, because news is sharable and debatable.

Opinions are formed around a news and the audience can be involved in the news. Millions of news are generated and shared on the internet and billions of people consume them. Just take a look at Twitter, its all about news and trending topics around the world.

This makes news reading experience an important part of Internet activity.

So what does Google’s step towards gamifying the news reading experience mean? Well, the fundamental law behind gamification is to encourage users to participate. That’s it. The more users participate, the more successful the game becomes.

Now, we all know that Google has been faltering recently on their part, as being the sole driver of traffic to news sites. Most blogs and analysts have applauded sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg and Delicious as the high end news traffic generator. As a result, the share of Google news as the main source is depleting.

For last few weeks, the aggressiveness of Google to tap into the social culture has been exhibited through its Google+ and complete makeover of their UI. The idea is simple, be more interesting and social than anyone.

So it is not surprising to know that Google has introduced an interesting technique to promote their Google news platform.

This could be the result of one of the brainstorming sessions at Google headquarters. But only time will tell how the game will turn out. But the history has it that any game if not created properly can be ruined by the player (take the demise of DIGG for example), by simply gaming them. So I am pretty excited too see how it goes about.

Here is the video posted on Google Blog related to the badges. The basic concept of the game is as below:

We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you. Here’s a taste:

Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are. You can also add custom sections by hovering over a badge and clicking “add section” to read more about your favorite topics. To get started with badges, visit Google News from a signed-in account with web history enabled and then visit this page on our Help Center for instructions.

This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges. Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.

Source : Google Blog

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