Google Fast Flip
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by anna
In the context of this week's lecture topic and the notion of The Daily Me vs The Daily We I thought I'd share a new Google application that has just been released.
In Google's words:
Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.
What do you thinkof this new application?
In Google's words:
Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.
What do you thinkof this new application?
I can't get past it as a novelty so far but then I've always been terrible at predicting the trends... What do you think about it?
I think its strengths are also its weaknesses:
Personally I'm quite drawn to the visual interface which I think makes it much faster to use and more appealing than other news aggregators. BUT I don't think it's necessarily all that brilliant to take such a magpie approach to reading the news (especially as the most superficial content is often the shiniest).
However, if the Guardian, for example, were to use Google Flip as a model interface I think that would be great. The horizontal scrolling is very natural and intuitive, much like flipping through a paper. There is something pleasurable about the linearity of reading the print edition from front to back that is missing from online editions. Maybe this kind of interface could be used in this way to restore a sense of overall news narrative?
Also, I can see how Fast Flip could be a first step towards making digital news profitable by directing greater numbers of online readers to news sites, and that's not a bad thing. BUT that means that Flip News is little more than a walled garden, excluding non-commercial media and it limits my options for news consumption.
And currently there aren't enough of my favourite reads there to construct a 'Daily Me' even if I wanted to. However, I think I'll try it out for a while.