Category Archives: fastflip

The Atlantic: How to Save the News

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James Fallows: "after talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization."

Business Insider: Google FastFlip Is Latest Attack On Amazon Kindle

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Dan Frommer: "What's the point of Google's new FastFlip reader? ... But because it loads pages very fast -- and requires minimal effort to navigate -- it could be useful for portable devices. Specifically, tablet-like gadgets with 3G modems that could compete with Amazon's Kindle."

ReadWriteWeb: Is Fast Flip Really the Best Google Can Do to Save the News?

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"Overall, Fast Flip just seems like a disappointing product. The cooperation with content producers is interesting,though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money. Google Reader or personalized applications like my6sense on the iPhone or feedly on the desktop just seem far more interesting and usable than browsing through a series of screenshots."

Telegraph Blogs: Fake Eric Schmidt: Google Fast Flip has saved newspapers. Happy now, bitches?

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Shane Richmond quotes Fake Eric Schmidt: "And here’s the part you ——— will love: we’ll share the revenue with you. Of course the ads will be ours, not yours. Oh, and Fast Flip shows enough of the article that readers will decide not to click through and read your pages at all."

Official Google Blog: Read news fast with Google Fast Flip

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"To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers. ... We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. "

CNET News: Google Fast Flip: The platypus of news readers

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Rafe Needleman: "In Fast Flip, neither standard Web rules nor print layout concepts apply. For example, in Fast Flip, you can only scan left and right (page by page). You can't read down the page. If you click anywhere on the page, you leave Fast Flip and go to the Web. Links don't work. And multimedia doesn't work on the page either. Fast Flip previews are, in fact, flat graphics files, which explains their lack of interactivity. On the mobile versions of Fast Flip, zooming in on a column is likely to leave you with text at a readable size but displayed on a column that's too wide to read without scrolling back and forth, making the feature rather useless. Hey Google, wasn't HTML invented for a reason?"

Content Bridges: Google’s Fast Flip Dips Publishers’ Toes in Google’s Own Ad Revenues

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Ken Doctor: "[Google Fast Flip] arks two important milestones, one about the slow replacement of news search 1.0 and one about Google's willingness to share its ad revenues with news publishers. ... Google is providing participating publishers with majority of ad revenues earned on the Fast Flip pages. Those are pages hosted on Google.com. Sure, we may say, Google had to do that. In using screenshots of the pages, it is using the intellectual property of the publishers, beyond any reasonable 'fair use' argument."