Has Google gone flipping mad?

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 14:59

Your IT - Home IT

The solution for the publishers is to make their content easier to read online, not necessarily easier to find.

Newspapers such as The Telegraph in the UK have had some success in this regard with a dedicated iPhone version of the newspaper, for example. The problem with Fast Flip is that, to be honest, it is neither new nor does it improve the online news reading experience.

Page flipping, where the on-screen content appears to quickly turn from one page to the next, has been around for years courtesy of services such as Zinio which already puts print magazines online.

It's a gimmick, nothing more and nothing less. I don't want to replicate the holding a newspaper in my hand experience online, I want to access the news stories I am interested in as quickly as possible.

I want the content to be free, and I want it to be easy to read. Fast Flip sorts the former, but makes finding and reading stories more difficult and not easier. Google News might not be perfect but at least it is designed for the task in hand.

Even allowing for the fact that this is still in the 'Labs' and so considered a test product, Fast Flip just tries too hard to be clever and ends up playing the fool.

The pages are very image-centric, many of them render poorly and headlines are difficult to read. Finding a news story takes longer with Fast Flip in my experience, and would be better off called Flipping Slow.

Once the novelty of the new interface wears off, after about 10 seconds, it becomes old news very quickly indeed. In short, it might be a new reading experience but it sure ain't one to get excited about.