Google News revamps, goes local
Google News is getting a face lift, making it easier for people to personalize the news by location and preference. The new “heart of the homepage,” as Google software engineer Kevin Stolt described it in a blog post, is a stream of headlines targeted to people’s tastes and interests.
Users can edit what comes in on the stream according to topics such as Business or Sports as well as view the news either as a list or by section.
Additionally, Google News is letting people choose which news sources they would like to see more of and those they want to view less often. According to Stolt, “these sources will rank higher or lower for you (but not for anyone else) in Google News search results and story clusters.”
Like all media, Google News is bitten by the local bug and now delivers city and neighborhood-specific headlines as well as the weather. One last bit, it’s now easier to share “story clusters” on places like Facebook and Twitter.
The video below explains it in more detail:
Google’s Fast Flip Trick
Google wants its online news site to feel more like the good old print product.
And the company is prepared to pay for it.
Google took the wraps off of Fast Flip on Monday, a slick online tool that lets readers flip through articles from newspapers and magazines as quickly and effortlessly as if they were turning the pages of a magazine.
The company said it will share advertising revenue with the 30 publishers whose content is currently available on Fast Flip, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Newsweek.
Obsessive Google-watchers may recall that rumors of this product emerged back in June.
But the company officially released Fast Flip on Monday, making it available on Google Labs, the company’s outlet for products that are still in the testing phase.
Google is essentially hosting images of the first page of various articles from its partner publishers. A Web surfer can browse by topic or news source and scroll through fast-loading snapshots of all the relevant articles. There’s a “recommended” section that aggregates the most popular articles thanks to a new recommendation tool that Google has added (watch out Digg!).
Unfortunately, Google has discontinued Fast Flip… which sucks because I used to user it every day.
I also used to recommend Fast Flip a lot. My organization teaches speed reading classes and we used to recommend using Fast Flip as a great way to read faster online. Now that the app is gone, we’re going to create a new one, that is even better. We’ll post updates on it here: http://www.irisreading.com/fastflip
Bad move, Google. The new layout takes away personalization and moves a set of (to many people) unwanted sections at the top of the page. The new column layout means twice as much scrolling to see the sections I really want. I don’t care about incorporating Twitter, Facebook, or any other service; news is news. Bring back the old layout, please.