Google Labs, the evil scientist’s lair behind the Internet Behemoth, have unveiled their latest project, Google Fast Flip, a compendium of the world’s biggest news websites with their front pages or main reports crunched down and compressed into small (and highly illegible) thumbnails.

At the moment it’s very much a US thing, there’s no major British websites besides (of course) the BBC, which has it’s fingers firmly lodged into almost every international pie, but no CNET UK, Register, ZDNet, V3 or (suprisingly) my own website. The page is divided into three horizontally-scrolling columns which contain recent headlines at the top, specialist areas (supposedly user-defined by logging in) of news in the middle and sources of information at the bottom (possibly a legal thing because it’s not always viewable on the screen unless you scroll down). The problem that I can see with this is that news websites aren’t tailored to have their headline readable from a distance as they are not, necessarily, trying to sell anything (unlike newspapers) and so it’s quite hard most of the time to read the headline itself let alone the information. Users are thus constantly basing their opinion of the site in view by the images they can see, which are seldom clear from that size.

I can see that this could be a useful application for ebook readers, specifically the Amazon Kindle (or if the rumours are true, Google’s OWN ebook reader) but possibly, due to it’s scrolling, best suited for the Sony eReader with it’s new touch-screen interface (if it had 3G). Instead of trawling news sites and fiddly RSS feeds on the Kindle (or other reader) this can give a comprehensive view of the daily news, but for that very reason it’s fairly useless for home computers given that RSS feeds and other web apps give us the exact same thing, but better, with more websites and more user-specific content being delivered.

When you do (eventually) manage to make out a headline or website that you want to visit, just clicking it won’t take you directly to the site/story, that would be too convenient. Instead you’re given the exact same screenshot you were just looking at, but larger. Presumebly this is to give you a better preview of the site and decide if you want to visit that story/website or not but instead it means that you’re pissing about with images and links, waiting for all of which to load (hardly long times you understand but when you just want to get to a friggin news story it’s tedious).

It’s a nice idea, but unless Google are going to release this with a eBook-reader-specific version, this’ll never be popular.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.