Google wants its online news site to feel more like the good old print product.
And the company is prepared to pay for it.
Google took the wraps off of Fast Flip on Monday, a slick online tool that lets readers flip through articles from newspapers and magazines as quickly and effortlessly as if they were turning the pages of a magazine.
The company said it will share advertising revenue with the 30 publishers whose content is currently available on Fast Flip, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Newsweek.
Obsessive Google-watchers may recall that rumors of this product emerged back in June.
But the company officially released Fast Flip on Monday, making it available on Google Labs, the company’s outlet for products that are still in the testing phase.
Google is essentially hosting images of the first page of various articles from its partner publishers. A Web surfer can browse by topic or news source and scroll through fast-loading snapshots of all the relevant articles. There’s a “recommended” section that aggregates the most popular articles thanks to a new recommendation tool that Google has added (watch out Digg!).
Google is running banner ads alongside the article thumbnails, the proceeds of which will be split with publishers (though Google won’t disclose the terms of the revenue split). If a Web surfer wants to read the full article, they’re redirected to the publisher’s actual Web site.
“The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet,” said Google Distinguished Researcher Krishna Bharat in a blog post announcing Fast Flip. “However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we’re looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.”
It’s a fine balancing act by Google, which can continue to stand behind its argument that it helps news sites by sending traffic their way while also sharing a bit of the wealth.
But Bharat acknowledged in an interview with Reuters that various aspects of Fast Flip, including the business model, are subject to change.
Whether the current iteration will be enough to assuage some of Google’s most vocal news industry critics remains to be seen.
Missing among the list of FastFlip partners is Dow Jones, whose chief executive called Google a “digital vampire” this summer.
Source: Reuters.com
Google Reader is a very useful tool for consuming your news feeds (assuming you still use RSS), however it lives in the browser, which means it doesn’t have the responsiveness and polish of a desktop app. For all of you Mac users out there, like me, if you’re looking for the best of both worlds, I hereby present to you Gruml, an excitingly new and handy desktop Google Reader application.
Gruml is just a lightweight application that sits in your dock and menu bar, and provides you with all of your RSS goodness. What’s great about Gruml is that it carries a lot of the features in Google Reader that we have come to know and love and carries them into the desktop client, which also includes features like starring, “liking,” and sharing posts (with tags and notes), and reading headlines that your friends share with you. And for those Twitter addicts out there who always have the need to tweet their news, Gruml also comes with Twitter support, permitting you to tweet articles (converted to short URLs) directly from the application itself.
Please note though that Gruml is still in beta, and as expected has its flaws, like running slowly on startup as well as lacking some settings in the preferences menu. Nevertheless, it’s a great application that runs well and shows great promise.
Google has decided to enhance the task feature that has been integrated into Gmail and other Google products so other users can share their lists with others. Gmail users can now opt to share an entire task list in a new email message. This enables the transfer of all of your tasks including pertinent information like due dates as well as any tasks that have already been completed which normally show up as being crossed out.
Please take note though that this only works with Gmail and not in other Google product where tasks can be found, like Google Calendar, the mobile version of Gmail, and iGoogle. However, the e-mailing feature will surely make its way to each of these places soon enough as Google is known for its light-speed development.
Gmail Tasks is actually the one and only feature to "graduate" from the Gmail labs, Google's test bed for new and experimental features. This feature was launched in early December of 2008, and it graduated from the labs last month. The other labs-only features, including the other 13 developments that were launched alongside the release of the labs program, still need to require user action to be enabled.
Source: CNET.com
