Bad #Gamification: Shareable Google News badges for your favorite topics.

Ugh. Why?

  1. Core User Experience: Reading news.
  2. What’s Good for Business: Google News doesn’t directly make any money as far as I can tell. The theory is that it drives traffic to publisher sites that monetize via AdSense, in which case reading more news is good for business. 
  3. The Meaningful Reward for Users (WIIFM): Users get… badges. Empty, meaningless badges. No sense of mastery, status, reputation, achievement - just badges. That they can share with their friends. This is no better than the Kobo e-book program we covered a while ago. 

Maybe, just maybe, there’s some kind of “quantified self” component to this, where it’s interesting to see how much time I’m spending reading certain categories of articles, which can be figured out from the badges and the # of stars on each badge. But even that seems like a long shot.

Foursquare has been both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that it demonstrated the power of game mechanics to a wide audience. The curse is that people don’t really understand what’s going on, and just copy the surface level implementation (“Badges!”) and you end up with things like this.

- rajat

(via Google News Blog: Shareable Google News badges for your favorite topics)

Source: googlenewsblog.blogspot.com

3 Notes/ Hide

  1. bunchball posted this