14 DAY TRIAL // Google+ is sweeping into everything else Google does, slowly but surely, exactly as planned. The latest small step is a new addition to the Spotlight section of Google News.
The section will now sometime include news articles that your friends and contacts have +1'd. This should help you discover things that may be of interest to you and that you may like that you may not have stumbled upon otherwise.
It's a solid addition and should prove rather useful, if, indeed, it works as intended. If your friends are the type to click on the +1 button and you share common interests and likes, the new features should prove interesting.
"Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations," Google Erich Schmidt states the obvious.
"But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying -- until now," he said.
In fact, that has been one of the major critics of the +1 button, especially at first before Google+ was launched. While people clicked on the button since they had gotten used to the Facebook Like button, it wasn't entirely clear what, if anything, the action did.
"Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d," Schmidt announced.
"You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles," he said.
It's not exactly the same thing as Facebook's auto-sharing feature, which notifies all of your friends what articles you've been reading on the site, but it should prove a good addition to Google News as Google works to build a social layer into everything it does.