This post follows from “The Publishers’ Dilemma: To Google or not to Google?” to detail the major products that Google has built for news delivery, and a little announcement of our own.
Google has been building tools to deliver news for years. These generally focus ruthlessly on utility and end user benefit and don’t try to support the historic business models to which newspapers still cling.
Google News
Launched in April 2002, this automated new aggregator displays content abstracts from over 4,500 sources, attracting 100 million visitors per month. It also attracts regular outbursts from newspaper executives, as only 44% of the readers actually click through to read the news on its source site, where advertising is embedded. It’s a huge, although technically unbiased, influencer in the news industry, driving huge volumes of traffic to the sources which are placed highly by its algorithms.
Google Reader
This is another delivery tool that has attracted millions of users since its launch in October 2007, aggregating and organising the Atom and RSS feeds from any syndicating source. In addition, a recent release allows users to bring in a stream of the recent changes to sites which don’t syndicate via RSS or Atom. Again, this is a very user focused tool, which delivers content in a completely atomised format, stripped of all of the advertising from the source publication (although some publishers do place adverts within the RSS feed.
Google FastFlip
Launched in September 2009, this is a more recent play on the news aggregator, displaying images of stories from Google’s news partners, in a interface that is similar to flicking through the pages of a magazine. Although it is a serendipitous way of browsing, it might be considered to be a bit of a novelty, and certainly is another demonstration of how Google can and will innovate with new interfaces for news, regardless of whether newspapers feel they are getting fair value.
Google Living Stories
This is a very interesting step by Google, because it moves away from complete automation, to acknowledge the valuable role that a human curator can take. In partnership with the New York Times and The Washington Post, Google displays curated topic pages around popular issues, such as the War in Afganistan, with an evolving summary, links to relevant articles, images, and a timeline of events. In my mind, this is the future of news delivery, with aggregations of articles, rather than the articles themselves, being the preferred format.
Google Chrome Extensions
The next product for news that is launching, is not just a labs product like FastFlip and Living Stories. It is a very powerful platform for delivering content and services right into the browser, again for free. Google’s latest browser release, Chrome 4, brings “Extensions” (browser buttons), right into the mainstream. They are easy to install, easy to use, and easy to develop. This means that content can now be delivered in near real-time, into the browser, thereby negating the need for a user to keep checking an open window or tab.
News Notifier
We have just released News Notifier Extensions for The Independent newspaper, ReadWriteWeb (which was covered here), and just days ago, one for the Comcast property, E!Online. Basically these little buttons allow you to tick the content topics which you like from the site, and then they alert you every time a new story comes in to the feed. You then click through to the source to read the article. More information coming soon…