Badges? Do we need some stinking badges?

Google News has this new thing and it’s giving me a headache. Now you get badges for reading articles in Google News. Little icons that level up the more articles you read on a given topic. If you read a ton of articles about hockey, you get higher and higher levels of hockey badges and soon your Google News page starts serving you up more hockey news in a more prominent place. Convenience or echo chamber? I’ll let you decide on that one. The badges are kept private by default although you can choose to share them over your social network in the event that you’ve decided that everyone you know will be fascinated by your reading habits.

Is it me or is Google just getting really really difficult? Like we all get the search box, Gmail makes some sense, but Google just has all these super genius people building these complicated web applications and it’s getting to be like flying a plane getting all these things to work.