Is Fast Flip Really the Best Google Can Do to Save the News?
Yesterday, Google launched Fast Flip - a Google Labs product that wants to give users a new way to browse newspaper sites and blogs on their desktops and mobile devices. The big business news here is that Google will share ad revenue from this product with the publishers. The relationship between Google and the newspaper industry has always been somewhat tumultuous, so this revenue-sharing model can be seen as Google extending an olive branch to content producers. The problem, though, is that Google Fast Flip simply isn't a very good product and that it feels more like a step backwards than the future of news.
Personalized Screenshots
The overall idea behind Fast Flip is interesting. Over time, the service learns what you like to read and will personalize its news suggestions for you. The execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Instead of a Google Reader-like text-based interface, Fast Flip displays a series of screenshots.
Usability?
On the desktop, you get a large picture of a page with the first part of an article without the ability to scroll down, and cut off sides where ads or links to other articles tend to be. Often, because a lot of magazines tend to feature very large images at the top of a page, all you get is a headline and an image. To actually read the article, you have to click on the screenshot.
On an iPhone or Android phone, the experience is even more annoying. Besides the problem that Fast Flip isn't extremely fast on a mobile device (images take longer to load than text, after all), the size of the screen guarantees that you can't actually read much in those screenshots besides the headline. To get a better view, you have to tap the screen and a menu will pop up that allows you to zoom into the picture or read the full article on the actual newspaper site or blog. As Rob Diana points out on the Regular Geek blog, that's a lot of clicking just to get from an unreadable thumbnail view to the actual content.
The other problem here is that Google is only working with a select number of content providers. At least for the time being, this is a closed off ecosystem.
Disappointing
Overall, Fast Flip just seems like a disappointing product. The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money. Google Reader or personalized applications like my6sense on the iPhone or feedly on the desktop just seem far more interesting and usable than browsing through a series of screenshots.
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Totally agree, and besides that it is nothing but a pale imitation of Fichey.
Good collection of sources. The thumbnails are nice, but they are overpowering and make the page hard to read. feedly is the best news feed reader imho.
Er, it's not the best Google can do - which is why they recently responded to the Newspaper Association of America's request with a proposal to provide (and manage) micropayments so that newspapers can charge directly for content and not rely solely on AdSense.
Like most things that come out of Google Labs it's a stepping stone to something bigger. Let's just hope that it's also something better.
See http://bit.ly/1qctSS for the proposal hosted on Scribd.
Mashup CoolIris and Google News and we'll be talking.
When are we going to start hearing stories of newspapers actually investing to help themselves? After thirty years of sitting on their behinds printing money, funky stenography and re-purposing press releases they have clearly lost the entrepreneurial mojo too.
Why is it not a single major news brand can sell little me some geo-specific IP-driven ads? If everyone in the world is now ready the NYT why can't everyrone advertise on it? In the face of impending doom, the masters of Britain's Guardian group decided it was more important to change the shape of their doomed paper to a Berliner format than to invest in a more dynamic digital advertising platform.
The bleating of publishers about the evils of search are pathetic. And, by the way, 6-figure salaries for columnists? If anyone wants to know who killed journalism. The answer is: Publishers.
Faster news flipping: follow news feeds on Twitter
This one's a real yawner. Gimme Techmeme/memeorandum anyday.
If the newspaper industry seriously thinks they are being fucked over, rather than kept alive, by Google, they have a simple solution. Go to Google, type in "robots.txt" and read it.
Until they do that, they should shut the fuck up and stop whining about how technology companies need to fix their business model problems. It's getting utterly dull to listen to their pathetic "woe is me" stories all the damn time. Didn't NYTimes go online in '94? They've had a decade and a half to get their houses in order. If they haven't been able to do so in that time, they deserve to go bust.
And they all blame Craigslist. Here in Britain, it's almost unheard of for people to put classified adverts in newspapers. Weekly ad rags ate up expensive newspaper classified ads decades ago. And yet we still have newspapers.
Will they fix anything? Of course not. Whining is so much more fun.
I enjoyed the last comment. Well done Tom Morris.
They just keep coming out with more and more products don't they
Any Google Labs product is a muddy window on a possible future.
There are a series of choices for any web news service. Here's my view of where fast flip is calling 'home':
Visualisation: Graphical search window
Sources: Mainstream scale media
Page production: By the source
Page assembly: Tag/topic based
User experience: Visual scan -> zoom in
Personalisation: Objective learning
Monetisation: Shared
Most of those choices point to a mass market bias - and many of the suggested alternatives are targeted at significant niches rather than that mass market.
Google Reader is a prime example of that kind of niche product.
Unsurprisingly, the last of these choices is where the significance is found: Google is trading its credibility in monetisation for a richer access to high production value media content.
Now, it's true that in its present form there are serious weaknesses. The browser experience is fast but painful, the iPhone version's landing page is laughably poor in achieving user engagement.
The question is, can you imagine these experience issues being resolved? If you can, then you have to imagine a world where premium sources save their best for Google.
That feels like a slam dunk to me. But...
It's a big 'but.'
If Google had delivered this five years ago I'd say game over. But the new media age is a mixed economy of sources. I don't see a star journalist feeling Fast Flip is the best tool to engage their personal reader base. I don't see crowd-sourced news - the only credible way to find the truly 'now' - being squeezed into the Fast Flip corset.
So I don't want the future to be the one glimpsed through that window. Because I want the news to find me. And I want to be treated as my own editorial control. Show me the stories I'm actually interested in from all the sources I trust and a few I've never heard of. Let me look over the shoulder of other people I trust and see how their daily view of the news compares with mine.
But here's the problem.
For all its shortcomings Fast Flip is the first credible mass market multi-publisher news site.
And...
If it captures premium mass market content it may be enough to forestall the future I want to see.
Very intuitive system. However, it may yet be a little confusing. I will keep visiting this blog very often. After this I will read all your posts thankful.