It may still be a mega-sausage-fest, but I'm still really enjoying Google+. And Google's most recent numbers are pretty astounding.

But the thing about Google is that they're always throwing out ideas, and so naturally some of those ideas are going to suck. Their worst idea this week is Google News Badges:

The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

What a terrible, terrible idea. This is like something out of Idiocracy, where news reading is reduced to a video game; I'm sure the eventual intent is to share these badges on Google+, but I hope Google kills this idea in the crib before that ever happens. Part of the pleasure of Google+ is that it feels so adult at the moment; this is something you'd do to get a dumb kid to read the newspaper for a school assignment. Why would you feel the need to brag about reading 50 stories on the Fukushima nuclear dissaster? And as far as I can tell, the only evidence that you've "read" the news story is that you clicked on the link on the Google news page. Let's just all agree to ignore this and maybe it'll go away.