Another week, another Google initiative, another reason to wonder whether the giant's vaunting ambition is going to be its undoing, wonders Ian Scales. This time it's all about aggregating magazines - or rather, magazine articles.
Google this week announced 'Fast Flip'. Don't be fooled by the cutesy name, it all looks deadly serious to me. Fast Flip is another way to atomise then organise the world's content and present it in a compelling way (and sell ads around it). This time it's a magazine-style visual offering - like a news stand. Instead of presenting flat globs of textual search results (like the vanilla Google search) Fast Flip offers magazine-style page images gathered by a keyword search. One click gives you a visual close-up, a second takes you straight to the primary source where you can read the article just as God (or Murdoch) intended. Here lies the nub.
Google has been copping it big time from publishers who say the search giant is eating their lunch by assembling and aggregating their news.Oops. More enemies. So the commercial shape of Fast Flip is designed to ease big (powerful) publishers into the online world and offer some soothing revenue share at the same time. Google has kicked it off (it's still in beta within Google Labs, naturally) with a collection of magazine 'partners' with which it shares the ad revenue... presumably many more will follow. It will be fascinating to see how this one does and, if it does well, how online publishing will change because of it. One thing is for sure, individual article layout just got slightly more important and website design and navigation slightly less.
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