Google Fast Flip: the new news-worthy revelation in news...

Google has finally unleashed it's latest Google Labs (experimental features) beta. Called Fast Flip, it aims to revolutionize the way people read news. Judging by what I've seen, it will.

The great hallmark of Google News has always been that it was one place where you could read news from just about every reputable source. This is still the case with Fast Flip, which not only increases it's catalogue offerings, but also allows you to filter by not just topic, but also publication.

But here is where the resemblance to Google News ends. Rather than present readers with plain text news on a page under headings. It gives you actual images of the actual stories from their original locations, complete with headlines, bylines, stories, and unfortunately ads. Then, you can simply Flip through all the stories under whatever category/source you're looking at. And in true Google fashion, there ain't no waiting for thumbnails to load here. It's blindingly quick. During our hands-on, I only managed to get to a story without it's thumbnail already loaded once. And I was being pretty demanding.

Then, choose your article with a simple click and it gives you a bigger preview of the story with some more options, including to see the whole article, or "Like" the story, the usual share options, etc. Then, one simple click and you have the whole story, at its original source. Right there.

It's freaking brilliant. It works like an absolute charm, and I have had no problems with the (still experimental) tool yet, so that's a good sign.

It also has a dedicated iPhone page, which is also fantastic. It operates as above, but a bit better because it has all the functionality of the multi-touch interface. First page you see you can choose your category, then flip through the stories with a simple slide. Then, you can either pinch or rotate your iPhone to get a closer look. Tap to get all the usual options in it's own dialog box as well as some more info on your selected article.

But of course, there is a far more sinister side to all this. The two-step process between preview and story means that it has opened a whole new world of options. Options that aren't so great for us, the consumers.

One of the reasons Google put the effort into creating this, and also into changing into a preview-view operation lies in the Internet's very nature. Online press is notorious. It is almost impossible to make money out of online press. More than that, it takes revenue from more traditional sources. Why buy a magazine or a newspaper if you can just jump on your iPhone and look at all for free, on the fly. So far, neither have publishers been able to find a way to successfully monetize the online press, because either your readers run away from costs to someone else who happens to be free, or you can't generate enough money to cover your costs, or that there just isn't an efficient way of visitors paying for their content without too much hassle.

However, it's been reported that much of the Fast Flip architecture has been designed with future options to monetize the story, if you want to move past the article preview. On top of this is the fact that another part of Google Labs ongoing work is the Google Checkout, a payment method similar to PayPal, which we assume forms part of the underlying structure behind Fast Flip.

The implications of this aren't exactly great. It means that soon, not even Internet news will be free. We could all be paying for our news, even from our (almost) entirely free friends at Google.

What is the world coming to when you have to pay to know what the world is coming to.

Google hits back...

Some time ago, I may have said some things on how everyone was beating up on Google and yet, it was all actually a complete waste of time. And now, i get to show you all why!

So, in the last little while, there was Wolfram|Alpha, there was/is Microsoft/Yahoo, there was some piece of forgettable drivel with a crap name like Bing, or Bong, or CRAP or whatever it is. But now, Google has returned to its original famed position at the top of the pile.

Google has done a couple of things. Like Google Squared. Like Chrome. Like Chrome OS. Like Android improvements. Like everything. And so everyone loves them again.

But now lets get into my attitude part of things. All these tools like Wolfram Gamma, or whatever, are a complete waste of everyones time. I'm happy to report that in the interval between its release and now, I've used it once and it failed me. There are also a couple of other bits and pieces that have come along and tried to claim the throne, but lets look at what has actually happened in the meantime. Firstly, and well, lastly too, nothing.

Has any regular Google user actually decided: "yes. I think Bing is better." and actually started using it. And before you all jump on my arse in the comments about god-knows-who, I don't care if your best mate's dog's previous owner's second cousin's ex-girlfriends niece twice-removed's grandmother's parrot's friend's owner's fiance's grandfather's brother's uncle's best friend has started using Bing. Nobody cared. Not even the grandmothers parrot.

Since then Google has made many announcements. They launched Google Squared, a new search tool which enables users to compile a lot of information on a number of things in one easy format, all using Google's amazingly freakish technology. They have also announced that Google Chrome will become Google's second OS, alongside the more lightweight Android. Interestingly, both OS's have claimed they're aimed at the netbook market, which already has two OS's vying for control. Bizarre. They have also announced and showcased one of my most anticipated Google features in ages: Google Wave. A form of realtime collaboration, it appears to solve the perpetual problem of there being so many conflicting and co-existing standards and networks by bringing all the mediums (text, images, video, web) together onto one place (the Wave) and allowing anybody to use it (but still allowing control over who joins the Wave). Cool, no? And this is the first time that I think I'm going to find a collaboration tool useful, if not because Google are the people to do it, and this is the first all-in-one solution...

Of course, there have also been a number of controversies. One of the biggest was after Apple rejected Google's Google Voice from its App Store for reasons of "duplicating functionality" which really just means: Google were freaking us out! This little blunder got Apple yet more publicity for its archaic App Store rejection policies and its continual refusal to cite reasons for its many and varied rejections. As well, Google got a lot of publicity for its tribute to HG Wells, which confused most of the interwebs for a long time, complete with bizarre Twitter posts referencing GPS co-ordinates and the iconic "All your bases are belong to us" reference, which should be in every geek joke.

Of course, this series of doodles which had people confused for quite some time, shows exactly what I'm talking about, and what I have been saying the whole time: Google is huge. Just from the Guardian, a fairly respectable publication, a search about Google's little joke returns 96 results. Searching on Google News returns 182 separate publications with articles on the "Google Crop Circles". A comprehensive search on Google News for Google hits me with a staggering 1.66 million results. And that's just the news articles from Google News...

Google is now so large, it actually is a part of our society. If you ask someone on the street for 5 words relating to the Internet, Google is almost guaranteed to come up. And that's my point, if you could find it somewhere in that incredibly difficult to follow, attitude-ridden, information-starved and generally non-sensical stream of absolute nothingness...

What's it all About: iPhone file storage

Welcome to 'what's it all about', the newest section of FerretTech. In these posts, I will attempt to be a bit more detailed than any of myother usual ranting gibberish posts and help you, my dear readers,with something. This week, I've been working on something personally,and it's annoying me, so I thought I'd save you the trouble that I've gone through to his point. That something is this: iPhone filestorage. By the way, a lot of this will be at least a bit applicablefor other applications in your dreary, probably geeky lives.

Most owners will know that Apple has disabled the Enable Disk Useoption in iTunes, or I'm pretty sure they have. So as a workaround,how else can one carry files around on their iPhone. Also note, thebiggest criteria: it's gotta be free...

I'm stingy. Anyone who knows me, knows it. So I don't want to have tofork out my cash for something that my first-gen Nano can do. If I've got a 32GB iPhone, I should be able to use it's space for FREE.

So, there are a couple of options still in the free domain. There aretwo main options: one is to have files on the iPhone accessible by acomputer. The other to have files on the cloud, accessible by the iPhone.

To the first of these, the local files. I have found two very goodapps that make a good solution. The first is Discover. Discover isavailable for the iPhone but also for Android as aFile. It involves afairly simple interface with viewing capabilities for all the major iPhone compatible file types, and a quality feel. Connection is byWebDAV, a relatively new protocol, much better than FTP or manyothers. Simply ensure that you are connected to the same network asyour iPhone, then enter the given IP address into any browser and youget another quality interface with many options and capabilities,right within your browser. This is one of those really good iPhoneapps that everyone should get.(Special Note to fellow BGS attendees: WebDAV doesn't work on schoolcomputers...)

The other good one is FileAid. This app has a slightly differentinterface with separate screens for computer connections, and for fileviewing which can be annoying. But the major difference is that thisone uses FTP for file connections. It has a separate sharing screenfor compute connections, and detailed instructions for connecting toFTP, which is probably a but superfluous consdering that anyone who islooking at this kind of app probably knows their USB from their PCI,and thei IP from their TWAIN… Anyway, this would be great except thatFTP is such an outdated protocol. I tried backing up my venerable USBflash drive and gave up after it gave me so many error messages andthen stopped that I considered punching a hole through my laptop screen. Of course, you can't simply replace a file already on thedrive because you get Error: File exists, or you'll receive an Error:File name too long, or any of a number of other problematic problemsuntil you inevitably become so annoyed you will do what I did and putsuch a curse upon the designer of FTP that he will never restpeacefully again. If it wasn't for this, FileAid would be a great app.You can view documents, sort them by folder, name, type, colour of theflying elephant who wrote it, whatever. But it's FTP, and FTP is crap,so FileAid is a case of 'missed by that much'.

There is, as I've mentioned before, also the Web-based solution. I'llbe quick with this, because I've only managed to make one work, andits quite good. Zumodrive is a cloud-based storage service, with 1GBfor free. You can access it from the Internet and you can access it from the iPhone, but since it's on the Internet, you need an Internetconnection, only here you can probably use 3G data. Not that I would,but you probably can.I've tried to make MyDisk.se work, and it does from the web, but notby using an app like Disks. Using MyDisk, you get 2GB free, as opposedto Zumodrive's 1GB. Still, if anyone can make MyDisk's WebDAV work with anything, that would be useful...

Okay, so now for the bit where I pull it all together and tell youwhat you should use. Unfortunately for you, I'm not going to do that.You make up your own mind. I, personally have all three, just so I'mready for any occasion, but I'm personally favouring Zumodrive at the moment.

So, the biggest things that we can take from this is two things: one,there aren't any really good solutions to this problem. The other: I am way too stingy...

The Return: Yahoo and Microsoft evokes flashbacks

Sorry to all my readers for the long hiatus, but I've had a lot of work on, and then I took a 3 week trip to France, and then had more work, but I'm back and hoping to return to my previous semi-regularity of posting.

Now this one is a little out of date, because it's been sitting here waiting to be published for a while. Enjoy anyway ...

But now, to the post proper. As is the buzz on every vaguely tech-interested news service, Yahoo and Microsoft have finally clinched some sort of deal together. While nobody has any strong details, it appears that Microsoft is the big brother in this little relationship, with some speculating that it could be the end of Yahoo. I, for one, believe they won't die out, but it won't be a good omen for Yahoo, who are already struggling against the friendly giant Google, and who are about to have half of their business stolen out from under them by Microsoft.

There is another question that is annoying me, and one that crops up so often i may as well rename the blog: Why?. (But FerretWhy just doesn't have the same ring...) Microsoft is not exactly short of a penny or two with the world's most heavily populated OS smothering the Earth, and they've just gone and put God-doesn't-even-know-how-much effort into creating, broadcasting, publicising and (as Microsoft tends to do) smothering everyone and anyone with "Bing!", which seems to be Live Search but with a new face, a less dorky name, and options to verbify it later. Although I doubt anyone's going to walk around saying, 'Why don't you Bing it', if not for the potential of horridly inappropriate mispronunciations, but more because Google is just sooo good, and soooo everywhere. And works so well as a verb...

So why, then, has Microsoft spent a good part of that fortune on buying a company that is being beaten silly by a certain company with one more letter in its name. And quite a lot larger than 1% of the market. Critics have suggested that its just for the advertising money, but this still just doesn't quite fit. For me, it evokes flashbacks of that wonderful tech match-up between AOL and Time Warner. Wow. I'm not sure I've seen a more woeful sop story from a company other than this one. If you're wondering what I'm rambling on about now, it's creatively discussed here)

As far as anyone can tell, nothings been set out about what's going to happen, or even what is happening. Only that Microsoft and Yahoo are getting together and what odd bedfellows they make

As usual, I could be wrong about all of this (which wouldn't be the first time) and it could just be money-hungry Microsoft trying to grab Yahoo's pathetic little share of the online advertising market. After all, they are feelng more than a little pressure from Google lately...