Google Fast Flip: The platypus of news readers
Google on Monday released an experimental new content browser called Fast Flip that makes it possible to see a curated set of content sites using a physical "turn the pages" metaphor. Fast Flip pages are cached by Google and load very quickly, which is cool. And if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it'll feel natural to use.
Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed really fast. But it still feels forced. It's an intermediate online format that gives you an experience that's even more linear than a print publication, and it provides less overall context than you can get from a moderately well-design Web site.
Dozens of sites are participating in the Fast Flip experiment.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)In Fast Flip, neither standard Web rules nor print layout concepts apply. For example, in Fast Flip, you can only scan left and right (page by page). You can't read down the page. If you click anywhere on the page, you leave Fast Flip and go to the Web. Links don't work. And multimedia doesn't work on the page either. Fast Flip previews are, in fact, flat graphics files, which explains their lack of interactivity. On the mobile versions of Fast Flip, zooming in on a column is likely to leave you with text at a readable size but displayed on a column that's too wide to read without scrolling back and forth, making the feature rather useless. Hey Google, wasn't HTML invented for a reason?
Fast Flip also displays Google ads alongside publisher content. I presume Google will share revenues with content providers, but this scheme does take control over advertising away from publishers.
Mind you, I'm not opposed to the creation of different ways to get people into stories. An old mantra in publishing is to provide "multiple entry points" for readers. If I get users to my pages from Fast Flip that I otherwise wouldn't get, who am I to argue? But Web designers have spent the past 10 years building sites that work in browsers, and Fast Flip by its existence tries to tell publishers that there's still life left in the old print-based, dead page model. I think we've moved beyond that.
You can quickly flip forward or back through pages, or jump to a particular page by clicking on its thumbnail view.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Here's what I'd like to see instead: first, I agree with the Fast Flip designers that loading pages takes too long and that caching pages in a Web app is a good way to bring speed back to content browsing. But can we do it with real pages instead of static graphics? Second, the idea that there's a recommended linear reading order of pages on a site is intriguing, even if the order is simply chronological. But I don't think readers want to be locked in to that order. How about we give readers standard forward and back content navigation buttons (not browser forward and back) to take them through a site in addition to the hyperlinks they're used to?
Fast Flip is clearly an experiment, and as I said, if it gets more people to read online content, I'll applaud it for that alone. But I'm not going to actually like it from a technical perspective, or as a user, until it gives publishers, designers, and readers more control over their content.
See also: Zinio.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
This is what I did:
1. Searched for "Android".
2. Flipped through the resulting pages, to get the gist of each article.
3. Clicked on the stories I found interesting, to go to the website for the full story.
Cool!
I like that there are categories, such as: Popular, Most Viewed, Recommended, etc.
A couple of features that I didn't see (or might have missed) that could be useful:
1. "Advanced Search", like on Google.com, to filter results to "today", etc.
2. "Custom Settings", to tailor it exactly the way I want it, when it is launched (e.g. specific RSS feeds, Advanced Search settings, etc.).
3, Perhaps, a way for it to remember (or for me to mark) which pages have been read, so that the same page is not shown to me again. This might be a bit tricky, though.
Definitely, an AWESOME concept, in any case!
Imagine flipping through the latest "relevant" business news on your smartphone, during a break in a meeting, at an airport, etc. Heck, you might even discover some recent news that should be discussed AT the current meeting.
This is FANTASTIC!
Content publishers will now obviously complain that google is misappropriating their content, harming their reach and most importantly skewing their statistics, as usual.
They will start ******** when the smaller players start getting there content online.
I think the reason why it's image-based instead of HTML is twofold - for the obvious speed benefit that still allows a faithful rendering of the publisher's page and to further encourage fastflippers to visit the actual page if they want more.
It may be more linear than any *one* print publication, but we're scanning through the equivalent of stacks of print publications with this, so the microfilm reader paradigm is apt. And there's plenty of potential to expand the interface here...add branching, enable links on the pages, etc.
Safari's new home screen does this "at a glance" viewing of my most popular page, and Reader will suffice for everything else.
I spent about 5 minutes on the Google Fast Flip and I like it. I hope there will be more content to come.
- by larrylawr September 17, 2009 7:13 PM PDT
- I Bet this would work very well for reading comic books online.
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