The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘google-labs’

Since the dawn of Facebook’s Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could send you inching down the treacherous path toward carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, there’s a way to view hundreds of photos without lifting a finger: a new Facebook Prototype lets you turn these photo albums into slideshows. You can activate the prototype here.

The new feature was released as a Facebook Prototype some time last week, and it’s about as basic as they come. After activating it, you’ll find a ‘Play’ button nestled between the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ navigation buttons in the photo viewer. Clicking it will turn the album you’re currently viewing into a slideshow, displaying a new photo every five seconds. That’s it. There apparently isn’t any way to change the frequency of the photo changes, and there aren’t any fancy transitions like you’ll get from iPhoto. But hey, you don’t have to click any more.

Facebook Prototypes are similar to Google Labs, in that they allow the social network to showcase some of the pet projects and unfinished features created by its engineers. Prototypes launched in September at TechCrunch50, and have since spawned some compelling new features, including a Mac desktop notifier, an improved photo uploader, and even a measure of Gross National Happiness.

Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.

Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below.

Google’s blog post on the release also notes that you can now import Google ‘My Maps’ into City Tours. My Maps, which launched back in 2007, allow you to manually tag your own points of interest on a Google Map. This means you’ll now be able to build out a map of all the landmarks you’d like to see on your trip, then import those into City Tours to get an optimized itinerary.

The service remains in Google Labs.

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I’m flabbergasted with some of the coverage surrounding yesterday’s launch of Google Fast Flip. For your reference, Fast Flip is a new Google Labs experiment that enables people to browse and search online and print articles in a quick, visual way. Additionally, it allows users to share articles with other people and has a degree of personalization to it since it sort of adapts to your reading behavior. To build Fast Flip, Google partnered with three dozen top publishers (TechCrunch, NY Times, Newsweek, and others) who will share revenue earned from contextually relevant ads.

So essentially, we’re talking about an experimental product introduced by a company whose core business is online search and advertising that basically makes it easier to – gasp – search and monetize online content. You could just as well consider it a Google News feature, and a cool one at that, but it is and remains nothing but a feature.

So why exactly am I reading headlines like ‘Google Fast Flip is Death to the Newspaper Industry’ and ‘Is Fast Flip Really the Best Google Can Do to Save the News?’?
No, Google is not becoming the ’source’ of all news overnight and monopolizing aggregation. No, the personalization element doesn’t suddenly give everyone a reason to stay away from traditional media (even though they could contain stories you might not be interested in). And no, the revenue-sharing aspect is not going to make a dent in newspaper companies’ income.

There’s a pattern here, of course, because this sort of thing happens every single time Google does anything in any way related to online content. There’s been a battle raging for years between publishers and Google, with the former complaining that the company makes money off their backs without providing adequate compensation for their content. Google counters by saying its initiatives are perfectly legal and can benefit publishers tremendously (we tend to agree). Now publishers are considering ways to charge for online content, and Google wants to be part of those plans too. There’s no denying there’s tension, opposite viewpoints and strategies, and a complicated love-hate relationship that’s bound to continue for the next few years.

But seriously, when was the last time Google – or any company – killed or saved an industry by introducing a new product? Did Google Base kill Craiglist or the online classifieds industry as a whole? Did the introduction of Google Reader lead to the demise of commercial feed readers? Did Google Orkut revolutionize how we network socially online and how social networks are monetized?

I’m calling for some perspective on this. While Google Fast Flip is a nice product, particularly on mobile in my opinion, it has its flaws and it’s not revolutionary any way you look at it. That’s fine, because it’s a Google Labs experiment, so remember that. If you’re looking for a reason why the newspaper industry is in trouble, divert your attention from Fast Flip and look at its historical business models, decreasing ad revenues and the way the Internet has changed and continues to change people’s content consumption behavior.

And please realize that one single company is never going to have much control over whatever is going to happen to the newspaper industry, one way or the other.

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Timelines are becoming an increasingly popular user interface. Today, Google Labs launched a new product called Google News Timeline, which lays out the top stories from Google News in columns for each day. You can scroll down to see more stories or, of course, can search for specific topics or keywords. (It also launched similar image search)

The timeline view gives you a snapshot of the major stories for each day, and you can drag the dates across to go back in time. It seems to favor Time Magazineand Wikipedia Events, although you can get rid of those results with a click. If you want to zero in on a particular topic, you can search for that term to see how a story has evolved over time. The timeline remembers your searches and saves them if you are logged in.

You can also switch the calendar to view stories by day, week, month, year, or decade. But why not by the hour or the minute? That is where Google news is weakest and losing out to Twitter search, in my opinion. Finally, to put a finer filter on it, you can search only news quotes, news videos, blogs, magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia, or various other sources. Maybe it could add a bias filter.

The idea is a good one, but this is very obviously a Google Labs project. Switching from year to decade, back to day is not seamless.Going from decade to day, for instance, doesn’t bring me back to the present, but to 2003. Similarly, it seems like it has trouble switching from search term to search term. This might be simply because it just launched, but I am hoping Google resolves these issues quickly so I can test it as a research tool. I often find myself looking for articles from the past, and seeing stories laid out on an actual timeline is visually helpful. It would also be nice if you could merge different sources, so that you could search across blogs and news at the same time, for instance.

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