Flip: The new future?

Google has introduced a novel way in which you can access information

Flip: The new future?

Google has introduced a novel way in which you can access information

Old IT boys will tell you that computers tend to spend most of their time doing two things searching and sorting. Most people, on the other hand, spend their time doing just one main thing accessing content. Needless to say, this is one reason why many people who are designing interfaces spend a lot of time doing usability testing.

Google, as part of this experiment, has come up with something called Fast Flip (you can check it out at https://fastflip.googlelabs.com/). Prima facie, it seems to combine the old with the new fairly well by giving you the feel of flipping a newspaper online.

How it works

When you visit Google Fast Flip, you are presented various screenshots of publications like The Washington Post, Slate, Marie Claire and others. Clicking on any one of them allows you to see the story. You then have the option of seeing more from that particular site, or flip through the other publications that are a part of Google Fast Flip.

Google has teamed up with around 30 publishers to present their content on Fast Flip. If you like a story, then you can click on it and move to the site that is serving the content.

Some issues

No system is perfect, and this is no exception. Right now, you get scanned pages in PNG format. While this is very effective on space and therefore bandwidth a picture from Slate, for instance, which featured Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, weighed just 69 kB though it measured 617 x 884 there are some drawbacks.

For starters, you can't scroll the full page (though you can see several pages from the same publication) and you can't click on any links on the page. To do this, you have to click on the link and visit the page on the publisher's site.

A reformed parasite?

One of the reasons why Google has come up with this system is because it has faced severe criticism in the past from the publishing industry. In fact, in April 2009, Robert Thomson, the editor of The Wall Street Journal, said that companies that aggregate mainstream media content (read Google) without paying a fee are the parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet.

"Google encourages promiscuity and shamelessly so and therefore a significant proportion of their users don't necessarily associate that content with the creator," he told The Australian.

In some ways, this could be Google's way of ensuring that both it and the content creators prosper. Google benefits because people will go to the sites of these publishers through Fast Flip (where it can show ads like Interior Design Ideas in the picture shown alongside). The sites have the advantage of having Google drive visitors to them, where they can show their own ads. And users like you and me can now easily flip through the front pages of major publications worldwide.

Right now, it looks like this helps everybody. Murphy may probably tell you that this is not possible, but he need not always be right.

QUICK TAKE
>>Google has launched a new service called Fast Flip
>>It allows you to see content from around 30 different sites
>>It also gives you the feel of flipping pages in a book

What is Google Labs?
Google Labs is a playground where adventurous users can play around with prototypes of wild ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Many of the projects are developed by Google engineers and researchers and supported only in their spare time.
Source: www.googlelabs.com