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."

Comments

Fast flip?

[nitehawk214]

How about just putting less crap on news pages so they load quickly?

Re:Fast flip?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, when I'm using a dial up connection (like on the island I vacation on) I deliberately load up the mobile versions. They look awkward, but they load like I've got a broadband connection.

Re:Fast flip?

[Tacvek]

This is much more useful when out of 30 articles a site posts, you might be interested in 2. In the traditional way, you would have to go to the new sites page, open up the pages for each of the sites sections, skim through the lis of headlines to catch the ones you are interested it, and read them.

With this, you can look at every single article page, and stop for the interesting ones, while taking less than a second for each of the pages you are not interested in. Like with a magzine, you flip through all the articles, and stop at the ones that caught you eye, such as by a headline keyword, or interesting image.

Re:Fast flip?

[T Murphy]

How about just putting more news on those crap pages so they read better?

Re:Fast flip?

[CityZen]

That's exactly what I thought. Only problem is that most of that crap is advertising, which is presumably what brings in the money.

I can hear the complaints already: Google is providing yet another way to cut off our revenue stream!

I just tend to avoid news sites that don't present me with a list of summaries I can view before deciding to hit the article itself.

Re:Fast flip?

[Slashdot Suxxors]

People are lazy and want it done for them

No kidding. Mind telling me what TFA actually says?

Re:Fast flip?

[Jurily]

No kidding. Mind telling me what TFA actually says?

You mean you actually care? I'm just here to make fun of comments and the occasional first post.

Re:Fast flip?

[TiggsPanther]

Most of the crap wouldn't be so bad, only most ad-supported pages block on the main content until the adverts are loaded. And, personally, if it takes longer to load the ads than the content then I quickly read the content, ignore the ads more than ever, and mentally blacklist the site for a while.

This can be annoying in and of itself but it becomes worse if you're on a bad connection or if, perish the thought, the ad-server slows down.
I've had these before. In one case, the link was s slow somewhere on the chain that it took a couple of minutes to get as far as the logon page for one site so I could access the ad-free version.

And then we have the sites which put an advert in before the content, or who split the articles into multiple (ad-supported) pages.

If the companies really want to protect their revenue stream then they need to make sure that aforementioned stream (the adverts) doesn't get seen as "crap" by readers. Relevance and not slowing the site to a crawl would help. Yes, some of us out here will dislike advertising on principle, but it will help in the public view if the adverts don't make it hard to get to the content that people go there for in the first place. Making reading the articles feel like effort really isn't a good buiness plan, surely?

Micropayments: The Real story

[mantis2009]

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.

Re:Micropayments: The Real story

[Jeeeb]

People have never really paid for news stories. You think $15 could possibly cover the costs of printing and delivering a months worth of papers? Advertising always paid for the content, which in the endless search for neutrality to avoid losing any ad-viewers (Erm, readers...) has helped drive the quality to zero.

Of course that said it would be nice to see this create actual incentives for news organisations to create good quality content in a much more competitive environment. Since, I doubt they'll ever be able to attract significant readership with another generic sports and book/movie promotion (Erm, culture...) column.

A few factors in load time....

[glitch23]

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.

Re:A few factors in load time....

[CodeBuster]

One thing that annoys me is when the ads have to be served from external links and those links don't work.

This happens because ad serving companies are cheap. Too cheap in fact to pay for servers and bandwidth to actually serve ads quickly. So instead they let their low end servers strain under crushing loads 24/7 hovering just on the edge of crashing because wasting your time costs them nothing. Yet another reason to use Ad Block Plus. Go ahead, use the nuclear option; the ad companies don't give a shit about you so why should you give a shit about them?

fastflip with w3m

[martin-boundary]

I use w3m for fastflipping. It's a text browser, so it doesn't load hundreds of kb worth of images and advertisements for each page, while still showing the text in a form that's close to the graphical layout. Also, it never loads javascript include files, which tend to slow down page flipping a lot, and never crashes due to embedded flash objects.

Basically, it lets you flip pages on the web as fast as is physically possible and... Oops, look at the time, gotta go!

Re:How is it faster?

[Tacvek]

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.)

Re:Making the act of reading more interesting?

[Draykwing]

I think you accidentally a word.

Personal preference

[SheeEttin]

Personally, I prefer COMPLETE BULLSHIT

(Reference, for those who don't read MS Paint Adventures. You should.)

I Prefer Their News Timeline

[tunapez]

That is all.

PROTIP:

[Hurricane78]

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.