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Google Wants To Ease News Browsing With Fast Flip
CWmike writes "Google is developing a product called Fast Flip that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse through news articles on the Web, a process the company says is cumbersome and discourages people from reading more online. Fast Flip, which lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, was expected to go live late Monday at the Google Labs Web site. The idea is to try to replicate online the ease with which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. This could motivate people to read more online, which Google argues will help publishers attract more readers and increase their revenue. However, when users click on a Fast Flip link, they will be taken to the corresponding publisher's Web site, where the Google technology will not be on hand to display the page more quickly."
How about just putting less crap on news pages so they load quickly?
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This article and summary missed the most important part of the story. Or, in journalism jargon, they blew the lede. Google plans to make Fast Flip a new platform for subscription-based news reading. You pay Google a tiny amount (say $.05) for every article that you want to read. Google keeps 30% of that amount, and the remaining 70% goes to the news organization that published the story. This way, Google thinks, people will pay for news stories again. Because the cost to the reader will be very low, and less of an up-front than a $15.00 per month newspaper subscription. And, you need to only pay one organization for all the news that you can consume: Google.
'Kind of sad to have to try "fostering" the act of reading. I say let them in the dark.
is not only the number of elements on a page but the type of data that constitute those elements as well as the virtual location of them. With ads being more bloated as time goes on and various Java/Flash components being added to webpages over time webpages in general tend to load slower. Of course utilizing a high-speed connection and using a fast PC helps mitigate that problem. One thing that annoys me is when the ads have to be served from external links and those links don't work. I'm thinking the google analytics content and the atdmt.com (I believe that's the domain) ads. It might help to not have content spread over multiple pages as well, which of course is only performed to increase the ad exposure for the readers.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
...and newsprint is dead (assuming of course newspapers keep up with archaic 20th century technology like the "internets").
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I just had a look, they say you dont hav to wait for pages to load..!!! crap, this is more painfull.. you hav to wait for "images" to load..as we are in a part of world where internet is still too damn slow, its of very less use.. also put some ad blockers and turn of styles ur page loads lightning fast..!! y use this one..!
This is why I like reading usenet and mail in an offline reader - just press the space bar or an arrow key and the next page/article *instantly* appears on the screen.
There are existing web page pre-fetch/pre-cache systems that work similarly to the system the article describes - if only they were combined with simple keyboard navigation....
Years after producing a crappy UI for Google Groups, which was worse than the threaded text-based readers most people read Usenet with, Google finally gets a clue? Say it isn't so!
Basically, it lets you flip pages on the web as fast as is physically possible and... Oops, look at the time, gotta go!
I looked at it and it looks interesting to me. The idea would be that If you had a favorite publication could could flip through all the latest articles, stopping if you notice something interesting. Or you can flip through major headline pages for the same thing. Or flip through the headlines in a specific field. You might notice an interesting image on an article, or an eye catching keyword in a headline. But for those that don't interest you, you can flip right past in a fraction of a second. Like in a magazine you might flip too fast to stop when something catches your eye, so you flip back a few pages.
The fast-flip name comes from the fact that the pages are pre-rendered by Google, and as soon as you arrive at the site it starts downloading as many of the images as it can, so you browser can display them without delay. Using the arrow keys on my keyboard, it is easily possible to flip past 10 pages in three seconds. (Image preloading will handle short bursts at that speed, but the maximum sustain flipping speed is somewhat less than that, or you start getting placeholders showing instead of article images.)
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With a fun extension called AutoPager.
http://www.teesoft.info/content/view/47/49/
"automatically loads the next page of a site inline (merging) when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content. "
You can also make it work on any new site after a few clicks.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
How is this fast? It's loading super slow with all these retarded images. It'd be nice to choose a category and see the top headlines without the images.
This isn't that fast at all. I agree with offline readers as well, it helps when the net isn't working. Oh well.
This wasn't that good of news to me.
Cooliris' built-in news image search is a pretty cool step towards quick browsing. Scrolling through 50 pictures in the sports section, I click on a picture of Serena Williams and the news story associated with it surrounds it. Awesome add-on for firefox and people oooh and ahhh when I pop it up on-screen.
* Making waffles just so I have something to Twitter *
Holy cow I just had an idea! What if we made a way for news agencies to post little "abstracts" of their articles in one central "page" Then we could link these abstracts to a full-fledged article. This way, people could browse all of the articles at once. No more flipping pages looking for flipping articles.
Genius Google, pure GENIUS!
Get me a meat pie floater!
It does look interesting. The single most interesting thing is that Google is in on the conspiracy to force me to purchase a larger monitor. I mean, NO WAY can I read any print, except the largest headlines!!
Interesting, yes. Potentially useful, yes. I'm afraid I'm not jumping on the bandwagon though.
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Personally, I prefer COMPLETE BULLSHIT
(Reference, for those who don't read MS Paint Adventures. You should.)
Too many newspapers and other news sites split articles into a bunch of pages. It takes time to get the next page to load. Some of them use standard hyperlinks for the next page and put it at the top of the page. On those sites, I can click with the middle button and have the page pre-loading in the next tab. Then which I get done reading this page, I click the tab for the next page, click with middle button for the 3rd page to start pre-loading that one, and proceed to read the 2nd page. Rinse, lather, repeat. Trouble is, too many sites use Javascript to interfere with this, probably to force people to have time to read all the ads. Google will have to face that ... that news sites really prefer to have people reading the ads instead of the news.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Looks like Javascript managed preloading, maybe AJAX style. They could make the preview scrolls wrap around instead of just stop at the ends like they have now. That's not hard to do. I made this 360 degree panorama wrap around with a little bit of Javascript. The big difference is they move faster a finit distance and stop. Mine moves slower but keeps going until manually stopped.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That is all.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
I think it's very annoying when you read the first page on Google Fast Flip, and you click through to the publisher's site, you're back at the top of the article. So you have to search the page to find which part you already read, and where to continue reading. Seems definitely not quicker to me...
The print-size issue is significant.
Since Google just do a quick-and-dirty page render into a JPEG and serve that to you, many of your browser's capabilities go straight out the window. You can't apply your own stylesheet, can't zoom text (unless you scale the image, which is not the same thing), can't copy'n'paste or... oddly enough... select, right-click and Google search.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Slashdot overloaded with quality posts because Flash Flip allows swarms of Anonymous Cowards to RTFA before posting. Consequently, each post becomes so long an thoughtful that each one becomes the size of the actual articles, but being comments rather than articles, Slashdot users won't spend the time to read them. Apocalypse.
What about Google Reader (or any other rss reader) in Expanded Mode? Loads the first paragraph of every story, you press "j" to flick to the next one. There's no network traffic between flicking at all, so it's basically instant (well under 100ms).
I fail to spot the difference, apart from having to pay for the new one. I guess Google could break Reader, but that would be kind of evil.
I must be missing something.
I browsed through the preloaded pages on Google; found a BBC article that looked interesting; clicked, and....then I wait for the original page to load?
So I guess the time saved is in the previewing the pages (headlines)? If that's the goal, then RSS is a much more efficient alternative.
Don't put fuckin' tiny navigational links on your sites!!
Seriously, what is it with these retard designers who choose to make the most important UI element on the site the tiniest?
Forums are the typical example. You got four screen pages of messages, and then on the bottom, there is a link that literally is just one character and looks like this is 8px font size: >>
And the page numbers are just as tiny.
The same thing is true for window managers, where the close button is a tiny dot at the edge of the window. (I removed those buttons completely and can just hold the Windows key and middle-click anywhere on a window do close it. [The left and right buttons are for movement and resizing, with the same method.])
And of course, without an ad-blocker and with all the Flash loading, it's slow as hell. For really fast reading, I recommend using a user style sheet, and disabling all author styles and images/flash.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm not sure I really get what the purpose of this is, if someone can elucidate that would be great.
So people aren't reading enough online, fine, you want to highlight interesting content quickly for them to get to.
I don't see how this view actually helps users identify what is worth reading and what isn't - certainly in the small view, the pages are too small to read, you just get a view on page layout and graphics, nothing about the content or the article. Even the full-size views, are screenshots of the page and as such very inefficient (the one of the BBC article on Eddie Izzard is 80k).
Why not just syndicate/scrape the content and post it as RSS to get through more content, or alternatively, if you're after a view of what it is without the actual text, just grab graphics from sites and display those instead. I don't see how taking screenshots of it helps the provider or the reader.
The pre-rendering is the easy part of the problem. The newspaper sites could themselves cache and pre-render the content if they really wanted to. The tougher problem is reporting. Counting ad impressions, page hits and link clicks. The paper needs to know as much information about you as possible so that they can sell as much advertising space as possible.
Fast flipping through ten articles would be much different from a user clicking through ten articles on the site itself. For how long did the user rest his eyes on each article? Did he see the ads? What link did he click on after reading the article about X? Etc.
Football Odds
Yes, I agree, RSS does the same thing that flipping though a newspaper would do, and I think it does it better in the digital world than this fast flipping would do. We are not dealing with a physical newspaper so tools like RSS exist so that we can find those interesting articles. We don't need fast flip. Mod up the parent.
The Fast Flip format actually contains less information than RSS reader, which also displays just the headline and possibly a summary and a picture. A lot of the times, you can't even make out the headline in the Fast Flip thumbnail (they ought to make it bigger), and RSS reader wins in text legibility. But I think the reason why Fast Flip is such a pleasure to use is because they prove to cause less visual stress.
Compare a "tag cloud" that makes a tag bigger in font size if it's more popular, and a tagging system that makes all tags the same size but prints an integer next to the tag to indicate popularity. The tag cloud format is much more visually accessible.
What the online news publishers ought to do is to provide snippets of popular news stories, but make snippets of popular stories bigger in font size, and less popular ones smaller.
I once had a signature.
If you observe closely, especially on a slow machine like the iPhone with ATT wireless, you see google displays the inner 12 squares of a map, but has the perimeter 18 squares in memory for fast panning. Similar technique for flipping. Teh previous is cached, the next few pages are pre-fetched.
Is it just me or is it getting harder to find interesting things to read? Fast flip / Micropayments would be fine if it weren't for my belief that constant browsing leads to decreased interest for general news.
I see why this story was tagged "GUI". I thought this was going to be using the same predictive model as adwords and the google news page to put related articles in a one click bar. That seems like the most natural extension of google news to me, anyway. Instead it's just a scaled down picture of the main page.
i was sad when i saw google fast flip so i wrote a review to explain whats wrong and some ideas on how to make it better. check it out and let me know what you think http://blog.cartercole.com/2009/09/review-of-google-fast-flip-why-i-think.html
A Slashdot-hosted screenshot of the article in each news story; click the screenshot and you are taken to the story.
I agree. I think the page thumbnails are really just an automated way to create something like an icon or illustration next to each link. The thumbnails aren't actually useful--they are just decoration. It's not a bad way to make the accompanying article descriptions more interesting to read through. But it's silly to portray this small s/w engineering feat as some groundbreaking new way to review information.
lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load
That's easy enough for them to say, with a spare copy of the Internet.
Allegedly.
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But you are NOT intended to be able to just read the article there. You are intended to be able to read the headline, see the images, and to see roughly how large the article is. (A few sentences, a few paragraphs, more than a page?).
If the story looks interesting, you click on it, and read it on the original web site. At said site, all those things should work fine.
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