Google introduces "Fast Flip"

http://flipper.googlelabs.com/

by henning • 17 years ago

139 66 17 years ago

flipper.googlelabs.com

bjclark• 17 years ago

I actually think this is pretty cool. I know I tend to jump from cnn.com to bbc.co.uk to espn.com to velonews.com so it would be cool to have a quick way to do this.

thaumaturgy4• 17 years ago

Aaargh. This uses one of the principle UI ideas we're integrating into our wanna-be YCW10 app.

EDIT: Hah. Plus "like" and the mobile UI -- that pretty much is 80% of our client interface.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

Try to stay positive - this demonstrates that you're onto a good thing.

thaumaturgy4• 17 years ago

Yeah, we've still got some tricks up our sleeve. OTOH, we were really counting on surprising a lot of people with the UI, and that's out the window at this point.

...And, this isn't just an idea on paper -- we've written a huge chunk of both the server-side and mobile client code already.

shotgun• 17 years ago

Welcome to the club! I think this is a UI design pattern we're going to see used a lot in the future.

What I find interesting is that you and I are both working on a journalism/publishing startup and found reason to use similar UI ideas.

We must be onto something!

thaumaturgy4• 17 years ago

Hey! I didn't know who else around here might be working on something in the same market, but I'm not at all surprised that someone is.

I wouldn't mind "competing" with someone in the YC or HN crowd, it would be fun -- and it's a big enough market, there's room for a couple of people to steal some lunches.

Hope to hear more from you and what you're working on. We might start releasing some teasers around the end of October; I haven't figured out yet if that would ultimately help us or hurt us, but it might be fun either way.

jonmc12• 17 years ago

When I can import OPML, do I need Google Reader?

joez• 17 years ago

Mobile version also available! Same site.

"Swipe left and right to move between articles. Stretch & pinch or rotate the phone to zoom in and out."

Keyframe• 17 years ago

It has potential... I'm having trouble with readability of headlines though :|

adamhowell3• 17 years ago

Wow. They're shamelessly wrapping ads around other people's content.

axod• 17 years ago

AFAIK with the consent of the content producers, and giving them a cut.

adamhowell3• 17 years ago

Ah, I do believe you're right:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/sources

Surprising they did it here b/f News and Reader.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Pre-rendering websites in the cloud, and sending them as images is an interesting concept.

If there was some way to keep them interactive, it'd be even more interesting.

jrbedard• 17 years ago

That used to be the concept behind searchme.com

jongraehl• 17 years ago

RSS skimming is better for me, but I can see the appeal.

zeynel12• 17 years ago

I think the logo doesn't go well with the concept. Their other logos are pretty good in my opinion

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

wmeredith2• 17 years ago

Not to nitpick, but I think you're talking about their icons.

zeynel12• 17 years ago

yes, and I have a design background I should know. I just saw MG Siegler too writes "the smiley face is built into the logo." http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/a-new-way-to-visually-s...

dfranke• 17 years ago

I was hoping it was an API for selling your startup to Google.

adamhowell3• 17 years ago

That was supposed to be App Engine.

nearestneighbor• 17 years ago

I'd love to learn more about this. Is your company more likely to be acquired by Google if it uses the app engine?

Edit: what's with the downmodding without explanation? Is this reddit now?

slig• 17 years ago

I don't get it. What's the advantage on reading a image rather than normal rich text?

edit: nevermind. Now I see the left scroll pane.

DavidSJ• 17 years ago

Why does it say "Google confidential"?

JBiserkov• 17 years ago

Looks like Google's reply to Bing's Visual Search (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822206)

mshafrir• 17 years ago

On a related note, what are recommended techniques of taking a screenshot of a web page from the server?

sjs• 17 years ago

They probably use WebKit to render the HTML to a buffer and then compress it, save to disk.

If you were asking more generally, see this discussion[1] on the WebKit mailing list, and these Qt links[2, 3] that I found in that thread.

[1] http://www.nabble.com/Webkit-capture-web-page-content-API-td...

[2] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/11/03/thumbnail-preview...

[3] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/01/15/capturing-web-pag...

mcantelon• 17 years ago

How is this useful (honest question)?

moe2• 17 years ago

I second that question. I browsed through some of the articles but fail to see the appeal. Technically it's a nice little trick but usability-wise I can't see myself using this.

req2• 17 years ago

What was your last magazine purchasing experience like? You might just not be part of the target demographic if you aren't one to flip through a magazine or a newspaper.

txxxxd• 17 years ago

It's much much faster than loading and rendering the html, images, and ads on the actual sites.

I can zoom through articles pressing the left/right arrows with no perceptible latency.

sbhat7• 17 years ago

This is especially true for mobile devices with limited bandwidth.- http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/mobile

eggnet• 17 years ago

Why use this instead of google reader?

jsz02• 17 years ago

Unless I am totally missing something you can't actually read the content without clicking on it. Is there much value in seeing an unreadably small thumbnail of a site before you choose to click on it? I suppose on mobile devices it might work. Loading a small blurry thumbnail could save you the time it takes to load the full page. If it indexed all of Google's searches it would be pretty neat. Previewing thumbnails could save a lot of time wasted on obviously bad results. Maybe that's where this is heading in the future. If not it's really pointless on anything other than a mobile device IMO.

icefox• 17 years ago

I can't even read the headlines on many of the thumbnails...

stse• 17 years ago

Never thought we were going to see prerendering of webpages :)

KWD2• 17 years ago

Agree with you. I see no use for it at all. I'd rather view the headline/snippet approach of Google News, Techmeme, and other sites.

njharman• 17 years ago

You and others agreeing with you are making the (self-centered) mistake of assuming that you are the market.

You are not.

As they indicate in the about page Google intends the target to be people who flip through magazines and when they see a title that interests them or a picture of someone they recognize they then read the article.

Whether that market exists or will be the actual market (if any) of this "product" remains to be seen.

KWD2• 17 years ago

I'm a Google News user, and think yes, I am the market. I also read and skim magazines (your definition of the market). In general, for all content, all people skim to choose what to read. It's what printed layout, and even web layout, is based upon (with possible exception of scientific/research journals - those always give me a text overload headache).

In my opinion, I could see something like this working if it was presenting me with printed content (say the actual print newspaper or magazine, which in some instances you can get in pdf viewer format that is similar to this). But for web content, the existing method is better. The new format is actually harder to read/scan (and I'm using a 22inch display). So I expand the many articles to one per page, and use the arrow navigation to go article to article. The result is more time spent trying to catch up on news, and more clicks since I have to bypass the articles I have no interest in reading. My choice would be to go elsewhere if this was all Google News provided.

mattparcher• 17 years ago

As a Mac user, I can’t help but feel a bit thrown-off by the aliased text, even if it’s the right decision on their end :/

lucifer• 17 years ago

Safari 4, ctl-t. No ads.

cmars232• 17 years ago

Hey, that's cuil!

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

This is not impressive at all. From the way Marissa Mayer introduced this at TC50, you'd expect much more.

bbsabelli• 17 years ago

Isn't Google "Flip" enough? Why would they add "Fast" to the name?

Pistos2• 17 years ago

In summary: I can barely read even the important text (titles, headlines), therefore this is of little use to me. I agree with others: I'd get a lot more out of being presented just clickable titles and headlines in a legible font size; and we already have that in several forms. Showing thumbnails of full-page screenshots is just a waste of screen real estate.

petercooper• 17 years ago

A few years ago I was playing with Web page screenshots and thinking it'd be a big deal. Some sites like DZone even got in on the action pretty quick and.. after all that time, I just can't see it having added value. It looks good but in terms of usability, I've found it adds little for me over time. Any studies been done into this usability wise?

budwin• 17 years ago

it's almost as if google is waiting to launch stuff until _right after_ a new feature comes out on bing

omarish• 17 years ago

I don't think this is a product intended for hackers who are connected via RSS and the such, but it's a fun product nonetheless.

cpr• 17 years ago

Can't they render the page images on a decent system like a Mac, with anti-aliased fonts and decent kerning? Horridly ugly images.

riobard• 17 years ago

same feeling, esp. after get used to Apple's font rendering engine ...

Eliezer• 17 years ago

Because attention spans aren't short enough.

ssn• 17 years ago

Crashes with accented chars. http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/search?q=á

Google introduces "Fast Flip"

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