ReadWriteWeb

Google News now highlights +1'd articles from people in your Google+ circles in its Spotlight section. Friends' faces and Google+ profiles are displayed next to the link, just like in Google's social search results. Earlier this month, Google News added the same feature for authors, showing Google+ info under their headlines.

While today's new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties.

Google News just announced a redesign of its U.K. and India sites in order to unify the experience across editions. The improvements are designed to be more browsable and present trending and popular stories more clearly, as well as to offer more customization and sharing options.

The U.S. edition was redesigned in May, introducing a one-column format, highlighted top stories and more multimedia links. These same improvements will now roll out for the U.K. and India editions.

Google News is building new ways to highlight great content, such as the <standout> tag announced this weekend, so now is a good time to rethink how to optimize content for the popular news aggregator, which also powers the news features in Google Plus.

A new study produced by Local SEO Guide, PerfectMarket and newsknife has shed some light on the factors that determine rankings on Google News. Among the top 10 factors under publishers' control are keywords in headlines and page titles, strong domain authority, social sharing of articles, and being first to publish. Citation by other sources is also a key factor, as is the uniqueness of the text.

The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."

Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...

A project that has more to do with Google's past than with its future is being shutdown as the company has announced that its News Archive Project will no longer update features and functionality.

In an email to newspaper publishers, Google said that it is closing down the project and will instead focus on its publisher subscription service Google One Pass, according to the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix. The project was similar to what Google has done with books in scanning and archiving the world's libraries. It was an altruistic goal by Google but may not be a fit for its future that includes Chromebooks and Androids and apps.

Google has been busy updating features at Google News recently and today it has announced a redesign of the product intended to give richer content while eliminating clutter on the page.

Google News has always been sparse but powerful. Its beauty is in the algorithm as it finds top story you are looking for along with every other story that has been written on that subject. But, like a lot of things Google, the interface was a little mundane. The new Google News is still not the most vibrant location for news discovery, but it is a nice step forward.

Hyperlocal and mobile news are the big news industry buzzwords these days. AOL is going all out with its Patch initiative and every few months a new hyperlocal news effort is announced, sparking the morbid curiosity of the news industry to see how it will eventually work or fail.

Google may be coming to kill them all.

Google announced today that its "News Near You" product, tied into Google News, will be available from Android and iPhones browsers. The beauty of this for Google is that it costs them essentially nothing to roll out this service whereas Patch and other local initiatives like Washington, D.C.-centric TBD.com spent considerable sums to break into the hyperlocal market. Can Google come in and wipe them aside in one fell swoop?

Google News has begun experimenting with a section titled "most shared" on its home page, apparently tracking activity on outside social networks including Twitter. When people say that some amount of social technology is going to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the internet, they aren't kidding.

The new feature has been given subtle placement on the page; it appears just below the Fast Flip section, near the bottom right hand corner of the page - where probably a mere several million people will see it each day. Its appearance was first reported by independent watch dog blog Google Operating System. At first blush, the new feature has some up sides and some down sides.

A lot of content on the Web today is syndicated across multiple sites. For Google News, that's a problem, as the service has to determine which one of these sources to pick as a headline. Today, Google introduced two new metatags that allow publishers to give "credit where credit is due," as the company puts it, and highlight original sources and indicate when something is a syndicated copy. Google will use this information to rank stories on Google News.

Twitter has come out several times now and said straight up - it is not a social network. Rather, it is a medium for discussing politics, entertainment and, more importantly, disseminating news.

It appears that Google News has caught on to this (not that Google is slow on the draw) and has begun testing a Twitter integration that shows news from your Twitter "friends" on your Google News page.