Do Users Really Want Social News From Google?
To its credit, Google continues to try and make its services more social, even though social media and social networking in general don’t seem to come easily to the search giant. In its latest move, the company has launched a major redesign of Google News that adds a number of features, including the ability to share clusters of news stories, and to vote on news sources, so that the service can customize what users see when they go to the home page. The intent seems to be to create a kind of personalized Google newspaper, but is that what users really want? Google’s news page has had personalization features for some time, including the ability to create custom sections (and share them), as well as the ability to filter out certain topics from the default view. And Google has used a visitor’s location — if they sign in to Google and allow it to do so — to provide local news and weather as well. The new features take the site’s personalization and customization a step further, however,
