Google+ Provides Mobile Content Recommendations
Today, in a push for more interaction with Google+, Google launched a new mobile content recommendation service powered by the social networking platform.
The recommendations appear when a user is browsing a participating mobile news site. Once the reader slides back up the page on the mobile device’s screen (a good indicator, according to Google’s analytics, that the person is done reading a post), a widget pops up at the bottom with a recommendation for continued reading. Clicking it opens a screen with the relevant items.
These recommendations can be additional articles by the same author, more stories related to the subject just read, or pages that are popular among Google+ users. The function works regardless of whether you’re signed in to Google+, but if you are signed in, the widget can also recommend articles your friends on Google+ have given a +1 or shared.
Google’s launch partner for this feature is Forbes, and abilities seem to be restricted to that site for now. The Google+ Developers Blog post gives examples of how visitors to Forbes’ mobile site can discover related Forbes articles. But soon, other publishers and developers will be able to add content recommendations to their mobile sites by adding a single line of JavaScript code.
From there, no web editor is needed to configure content recommendations; right from their Google+ publisher accounts, managers can customize their recommendations, such as making the widget appear when a user scrolls past a certain anchored element (as opposed to once the user slides back up the page), specifying content not to be recommended, and making a list of pages that won’t use the widget.
Google+ product manager Seth Sternberg told TechCrunch the new service aims to help publishers keep readers on their pages. He said readers often leave a publisher’s site after one article because they typically don’t see any other stories they’d like to read. So Seth’s Google+ team set out to develop an “awesomely seamless experience to find more content.”
The content recommendation feature is currently available only on iOS and Android devices.
So, what do you think? Is this service helpful or annoying? Are you likely to explore Google+ recommendations?
