Today Google launched a news service called Fastflip and you can access it by going to http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/
Fastflip is a news site that acknowledges that reading the news online is a far worse and slower experience than reading an actual printed copy of what you want, be it People Magazine, Sports Illustrated, or the New York Times. I read the New York Times every morning, and having the ability to scan the page and quickly look for interesting articles is hard to reproduce online partly because much of what paper readers read isn’t the headlines, it’s the articles we spy on the same page as another article.
Ironically, I read about Fastflip in the printed copy of the paper, and then went out to the site to have a look.
I will give Google credit for realizing that news is not one-size-fits-all, and they do allow the reader to select the type of news they want, like sections of a newspaper, from sports, to business, to entertainment, and headlines. They also allow you to select your source. So I clicked on the New York Times and saw that they just had thumbnail pictures of all of the articles. Once at source I didn’t get the ability to choose sections, which is a big mistake. The picture of the article about Fastflip is to the right. The image is so small I can’t tell what it is. I am able to read the title of the article at the bottom, but barely. Scanning the printed version is still ten times better than this first effort.
I suspect that Google is trying to strike some balance between the old fashioned paper readers like me and the YouTube generation (the Fastflip layout reminds me more of the YouTube layout than a paper, with most popular articles at the top, followed by sections), but in an effort to seemingly please everyone, my guess is that this will please few.
So while I applaud Google’s appreciation for the problem space in terms of “how” people consume news online, this needs some further rethinking.
-Ric
Leave a Reply