



Google Wants To Ease News Browsing With Fast Flip 125
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."
Fast flip? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about just putting less crap on news pages so they load quickly?
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Or they are going to bring the tech to all worlds. The problem with your method is not that it doesn't work, but that it takes effort. People are lazy and want it done for them, and I don't see in this case why software shouldn't do the task for them. Switching from windows isn't always viable or smart in all cases.
Online I just read headlines then decide if I want to go further, but some people may not like that method and may want to see pictures/more of the article like a real newspaper.
I personally m
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No kidding. Mind telling me what TFA actually says?
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I see what you did there.
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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.
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Re:Fast flip? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Very often the story is in the first few paragraphs. This way you can read the important bits without every leaving Google....
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Thankfully, Portuguese newspapers still have a crap free online presence: http://economia.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1400709&idCanal=57 [publico.clix.pt]
The only ad in that page is the small "Clix" jpg image in the right corner.
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So... you don't like this because it doesn't help you.
Nice.
Where have you been and when are you going back?
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Hmm? The only browser of any consequence in the "Windows world" that doesn't have tabs is IE6, and even that's found mostly in corporate environments these days. IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Chrome... they all have tabs.
Ah. Now I get the point of your post. And why it takes an insightful mod to get y
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I can't imagine how folks with dialup can manage anymore. There is so much cruft on most pages, lately, that it is even hosing my high speed cable. Thank you /. for keeping it simple.
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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.
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Uh.. how? mobile.slashdot.org for instance justs gets you to a full-graphics page about cell phones...
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Lynx or links.
Re:Fast flip? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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 th
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Micropayments: The Real story (Score:5, Informative)
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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 ev
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However, with this new arrangement, their largest costs, the actual printing and distribution, are gone. The internet (and Google) allow them to go from 100,000 subscribers to 4million subscribers overnight, with just about nothing in extra costs. For every 1,000,000 article reads at a nickel each, your talking about
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...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.
Newspapers are neutral? That's news to me! I'd bet it's also news to the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. My local paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has been putting leaning articles into its paper for years and have passed it off as objective. Its left-leaning, and it's been losing market share. I doubt it's because it's not left-leaning enough.
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However, The average daily newspapers column is often little more than a republication of whatever has been in the news the previous evening, generally drawn from the same AP/Reuters/... news feed. It's the news... but late and cov
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Making the act of reading more interesting? (Score:1)
'Kind of sad to have to try "fostering" the act of reading. I say let them in the dark.
Re:Making the act of reading more interesting? (Score:5, Funny)
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It was no accident. Actually, meketrefti is a genius, who has been working on a new, unified theory of intelligence. As part of this research, he's developed a new form of communication, which conveys information directly into the mind without misunderstanding. It's really an astounding piece of work; a true tour de force, right up there with the greatest advances mankind has ever made. What's more, it's such an elegant theory that I can explain it in a few simple words. Here's how it works:
Well, you a
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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 m
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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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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.
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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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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 h
less information but less visual stress (Score:2)
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
A few factors in load time.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A few factors in load time.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [mozilla.org]. 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?
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If they are that much on the margin, then it wouldnt take much to really break them and NOT work at all, giving them zero revenue for a day.
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over time webpages in general tend to load slower.
Not just load slower but read slower. Advertising has a very real cognitive cost associated with them that advertisers like to pretend doesn't exist. And that cost is now getting ridiculous.
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Ad's devalue other ad's.
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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.
All that is completely irrelevant once you block the bloat elements (flash, ads, etc). And, it seems even in this new service they are still a problem:
Take this story [googlelabs.com]. Looking at it (after disabling Ad-block) shows two ads, and an incomplete article.
Once you press the link, you get into this page [nationalreview.com] which shows the complete article infested with blinking and moving ad-banners.
I have been using Adblock Plus since maybe 5 years (used Adblock before), and nowadays I cannot stand browsing the internet in its "nati
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I'm thinking the google analytics content
You've discovered Google's devious plan: -
1. make the entire web really slow. ...
2. make the web really fast again!!! (if you pay us)
3.
4. profit!
It's live... (Score:1)
...and newsprint is dead (assuming of course newspapers keep up with archaic 20th century technology like the "internets").
is it good for slower connections?? (Score:1)
Reinventing NNTP pre-loading (Score:2)
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....
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Google reader has "J" and "K" keyboard navigation to go the the next/prev article.
In fact, most online RSS aggregators have keyboard navigation. This is not quite the same as what google flip is however. Being able to see images, page layout and headlines combined on a page and the next/previous pages just out of the corner of your eye is closer to reading a real magazine.
Google Groups paved the way (Score:2)
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!
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Nope, no such luck. This has got to be the lamest thing I've ever seen come out of Google. The "fast flip" is just a bunch of screen shots of articles from various sites. Imagine that someone went to, say, Slashdot, clicked on an article, and took a screen shot of the browser window. Repeat for each article. Then they arranged them all with previous/next buttons to "fast flip" from one to another. That's exactly what Google has done here. Just a bunch of static PNGs. Color me unimpressed.
fastflip with w3m (Score:4, Funny)
Basically, it lets you flip pages on the web as fast as is physically possible and... Oops, look at the time, gotta go!
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I bet there's a Firefox extension for that. Opera can do user stylesheets and disabling scripts/images with one key anyway.
So you can still use all the extensions and features that you still might need. (Or are you one of those that would prefer surfing trough emacs as a combined telnet and OS shell? ^^
Firefox has it now (Score:2)
http://www.teesoft.info/content/view/47/49/ [teesoft.info]
"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.
Kinda slow (Score:1)
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.
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For me with a broadband connection the images load really quickly, and I can easily quickly flip through 100 articles in a minute, opening all the interesting ones in new tabs to read. In that period of time, I could only load say 20 article pages the normal way to decide if they are worth reading.
News Image search (Score:1)
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.
ROFL Google, meet the internet... (Score:1)
Genius Google, pure GENIUS!
Personal preference (Score:3, Informative)
(Reference [mspaintadventures.com], for those who don't read MS Paint Adventures. You should.)
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Personally, I prefer COMPLETE BULLSHIT [datafall.org]
That is totally whack.
And kinda cool. What is it?
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That thing is really badly designed. I mean the page-flipping idea is kinda OK. But it's
1. Slow as hell. It usually lags and slips way past what you pointed the mouse at.
2. Has very buggy styles. The text is cut off at the borders.
3. Does not use any usability knowledge.
a) Lacks headlines in the boxes.
b) Lacks lead-in sentences/paragraphs.
c) Lacks an acceptable font.
d) The images get cut off. Mostly in a manner that make
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The Complete Bullshit News Aggregation page, despite obvious flaws in it's name and rainbow design has implemented a remarkably innovative news reader design. If they could figure out some way to let me personalize the reader to filter only the types of stories that I care about (like how newspapers have a Sports section, an Arts and Entertainment section, a Business section, and then a whole bunch of other sections I throw away because I don't care about them) then something like this could catch on.
Hel
Don't split pages. (Score:2)
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
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But this is a micro payment thing. Effectively paying the news provider to take out the adverts.
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If they are going to want payments, they are going to have to figure out a reliable, safe, and non-abusable, payment system. Credit cards and PayPal don't cut it.
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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 [ham.org] 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.
I Prefer Their News Timeline (Score:2, Interesting)
That is all. [googlelabs.com]
Irritating (Score:2)
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 Future: (Score:1)
RSS Readers? (Score:1)
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.
How is this better than RSS? (Score:2)
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.
Not a Physical Newspaper (Score:2)
PROTIP: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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(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.])
How do you do this?
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Most keyboards or mice have a lot of unused buttons which you can program to do a specific task such as killing/resizing/moving/tiling/etc. By using those special buttons, you don't have to hold down a modifier key if you don't like.
Here's another fun thing to do: program one of your unused k
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What about in windows?
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By comparison, site navigation elements should certainly be big and easy to click on, since users will need to click on them very frequently, and there is very little cost associated with a mis-click (just use the back button and you're fine).
By the way, yo
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For really fast reading, I recommend using a user style sheet, and disabling all author styles and images/flash.
But what if I like to read about entertainment/fashion? 90% of the news IS the pictures.
An inefficient solution to a non-existant problem? (Score:2)
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
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Google maps pre-fetches perimenter (Score:2)
Less interest in browsing (Score:1)
Not what I thought it was... (Score:2)
my review of google fast flip (Score:1)
This would be great for Slashdot (Score:1)
A Slashdot-hosted screenshot of the article in each news story; click the screenshot and you are taken to the story.
i Can Haz cache? (Score:1)
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.