Comments on: Google’s Fast Flip – a cruel joke on the news industry

By: Crawling the news « HerrHorn.com

Crawling the news « HerrHorn.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:41:48 +0000

[...] is only in its early development stages right now and it remains to be seen whether news providers will fall for it – or in some cases refuse to cooperate. 3am, a gossip website in the UK, recently decided to [...]

By: This week in media musings: The jumbled mess that is Fast Flip, and the great micropayment debate | Mark Coddington

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:43:59 +0000

[...] idea, he says it’s time to take Google’s efforts to help news organizations seriously. Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog couldn’t agree less, calling Fast Flip an opportunistic joke on [...]

By: Google’s Plan to Become The Media Company

Google’s Plan to Become The Media Company — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:01:17 +0000

[...] doing that; its gallery of pre-loaded news page images is so crude that initial reviews were pretty harsh. But with Fast Flip, Google tipped its hand to a much broader, ambitious strategy: Google has said [...]

By: links for w/ending: 2009-09-18 « Please Stand By

links for w/ending: 2009-09-18 « Please Stand By — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:02:39 +0000

[...] Lawrence Miles thinks he can do better than this Collection. Contains Seasons 1-4 of Doctor Who Google’s Fast Flip – a cruel joke on the news industry Until now Google has walked a fine line in claiming that it is not the parasite that the news [...]

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:12:32 +0000

Sorry fact about all this Google-vs-Publisher battle is that the only imaginable countermeasure publishers can think of is to call for protectional help from the government. This hasn’t helped any dying industry in the past – but why would they learn from history?

By: The Onion Microfiche: all the satire that’s fit to fit on your iPhone - Partytow

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:03:20 +0000

[...] experiment. Of course, Google isn’t a news organisation. It just does things like this which, in the words of Paul Bradshaw, make Google look as though it’s treating news organisations in the manner of a small boy [...]

By: The Onion Microfiche: all the satire that’s fit to fit on your iPhone @ Technology News

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:16:23 +0000

By: paulbradshaw

paulbradshaw — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:21:25 +0000

As you can see from my previous post, I was being rather ingenuous in implying it is another Issuu – Fast Flip does benefit form Google’s processing power (i.e. yes, it’s faster than equivalents – although images do slow it down as other commentators have noted) and personalisation power (basically the fact that Google is likely to know what you search for, click on, email about, etc.).
I’m not sure how publishers can expect more traffic from this other than the fact that the competition is smaller because this is a new service that only a few dozen news providers have signed up to. But as I say, the numbers who don’t click through (and who would have clicked through on Google News) probably negate any added clicks.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:57:04 +0000

The post misses the impact of the Fast Flip service. It isn’t another Issuu. Two minutes on Issuu shows it’s a load of crap. Five minutes with fast flip shows a highly usable service. It’s not the idea (analog, schmanalog), it’s the implementation. Fast flip is fast, and it supplies articles from a fairly good set of sources. It’s going to be popular because it so usable.

Google isn’t doing this to save newspapers or any such thing; it’s doing it for itself (duh). It probably believes it can do it much more competently than others (and it seems to be right in that). The publishers are not signing in blind panic I’m sure, although likely with some nervousness. They probably expect little from the ad revenue sharing, but do expect to benefit from the traffic, even if it is with slightly shorter time-on-site.

By: Is Google Just Toying With Newspapers Now? | PHP Hosts

Is Google Just Toying With Newspapers Now? | PHP Hosts — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:11:17 +0000

[...] Blog that suggests (similar to my thoughts on the micropayment stuff) Google’s Fast Flip is a cruel joke being played on the news industry (on purpose or not). At that link, Paul Bradshaw argues that the cruel joke is that Google would [...]