As Dan Gillmor suggests, a better name would probably be Living Topics. The service, which is an amazing technological feat, groups news stories and deconstructs them for better online viewing. Google says the automated initiative, which it launched in co-operation with the New York Times and the Washington Post, does three things:

• Puts the entire coverage of a story under a single URL
• Chunks up the story elements by theme and form
• Customizes the reading experience so each person sees story developments new to them
  

The main benefit appears to be that it automatically generates context for stories by creating bite-sized content summaries and aggressively linking between them. For example, users can sort the story content by subtopics, major characters, quotes, external links, images, graphics, video, audio, etc. The size of the story summary also indicates its importance and newness, according to this Google video.

The Living Stories site isn’t optimized for my iPhone in any way. No doubt that’s coming; this sorting and grouping feature would seem tailor-made for mobile users.

Each topic starts with a dynamic topic summary and timeline. But the service doesn’t just reformat existing content. At the story level, there are some subtle differences from the versions that appear on the news outlet’s website. Take the War in Afghanistan Living Story and a story that’s part of it (Afghan Says Army Will Need Help Until 2024) , which is also on the Times’ website. In the Living Stories version …

• a link to Hamid Karzai, for example, goes not to a detailed bio like the one on the Times site, but to a pop-up snippet description
• there’s a link (“pledged to begin withdrawing American troops”) to a related story that isn’t made on the Times site
• an interactive map, which is not in the Times story, shows the location of the capital, Kabul.

The service has the potential to improve the online reading experience in a number of ways:

• by narrowing the inverted pyramid, so stories are less broad at the top — and more to the point — because the context surrounds it
• by including more summaries, which usability advocate Jakob Nielsen says are crucial for online reading
• by more aggressively linking content than human editors can — thereby improving the user experience on small screens

Still, there seem to be limitations. The importance of topic pages would seem to be diminishing as people increasingly consume content at the story level via Twitter and Facebook links. And I can think of many stories that won’t fit easily under topic designations.

But it’s a worthy innovation. I’m waiting for the mobile version.

Google Fast Flip interface for mobile.

So this is it.

In April, Sharon Waxman reported a conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which he told her:

“In about six months, the company will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it” … one in which users “will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them” … and which Google “will be able to sell premium ads against premium content.”

Google Fast Flip appears to be all that.

The company claims the visual news finding tool “personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like.”

Make no mistake — this is an application built from the ground up for mobile. (In addition to being available in Google Labs on the web, Google offers it as a mobile site for iPhone and Android devices.)

Reading stories from multiple sources isn’t easy to do on a mobile device right now. Neither is search. Done right, personalized, visual news could truly be a killer app.

As Scott Karp says, it’s “a new UI (user interface) for news.” Further, it’s Google re-asserting its claim to the browser, not the app, as the viewing space for mobile content.

Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times told Ken Doctor, “We’re trying to find out how users relate to a visual interface.” There’s certainly much to learn — and there are quirks with Fast Flip. But, the interface, with a firm nod to Apple’s Cover-Flow, is an excellent fit for mobile devices.

That’s great for consumers. And, as Nisenholtz points out, it’s the brand presence news publishers have wanted. But it also gives Google the upper hand in yet another news viewing space.

Colour-coded lines show traffic congestion in Google Maps for Mobile.

“It’s stop and go on the bridge.” “Watch out for that deer on the 102.”

The voices are a staple of local radio — listeners calling in to report traffic conditions. On-air updates build audiences, involve listeners and bring advertisers to morning and afternoon shows.

But Google believes it can deliver traffic reports faster and with more accuracy by harnessing the power of mobile users.

Google announced today it was bringing the power of crowd-sourced data to its Traffic layer in Google Maps, currently available only in the U.S.

Users of Google Maps for Mobile have to allow Google to see their location first. But when they do, they contribute traffic data anonymously and effortlessly as they travel. Their GPS-enabled mobile phone contributes their location and aggregates it with others to form a live picture of traffic in the area. Its announcement states:

When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google also announced it was expanding its Traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterial roads.

Google has the leading mobile map app. While it’s competing with standalone GPS providers such as TomTom and Garmin in providing driving assistance, the division between smartphones and standalone devices is already starting to fall. TomTom released its turn-by-turn maps as an iPhone app 10 days ago — the first company to do so.

Google’s move is yet another grab at services traditionally provided by news media — services that bring revenues to support local newsrooms. While newspapers have had their audiences slashed by aggregators of news and classified listings, radio has remained relatively unscathed by advances in online technology.

The move puts radio producers on notice that they too need to find other ways of strengthening listener interaction.

The phrase “mobile usability” is pretty much an oxymoron. It’s neither easy nor pleasant to use the Web on mobile devices. Observing user suffering during our sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994. It was that bad.

Sure, Nielsen is a curmudgeon on this stuff. But his analysis is generally bang on. The worst aspect, he states, is half of the problems with the devices are structural and are unlikely to be substantially improved.  The primary issues include:

• Small screens. They force users to remember more because less information is displayed at any one time. They also make interactions difficult because the work area is smaller.
• Awkward input. Doing anything – entering text, clicking a link or scrolling – is slow and prone to error.
• Download delays. Wireless service is still slower than a landline.
• Poorly designed sites. Most sites are designed for the desktop, not mobile. In fact, the study showed that the success rate for people who used sites that were designed specifically for mobile devices was 21% higher than that for the same sites desktop users see.

One of the key findings was that mobile users spent 38% more time on tasks such as finding the weather and TV listings than they did in 2000, when users had fewer choices. Why?

Today’s mobile users are highly search-dominant. When we don’t specify which site they should use (and often even when we do), they turn first to their favorite search engine. Again, this means plenty of typing, which is slow, awkward, and error-prone on mobile devices.

What’s needed, says Nielsen (not surprisingly), are more sites designed specifically for mobile devices.

The study is unclear as to whether smartphone applications provide substantial benefit over browser-based sites tailored for mobile. That’s the argument Google Engineering Vice-President Vic Gundotra highlighted on Friday with his comment, “the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters.”

Still, on that note, Nielsen offers a telling anecdote:

In our current study, one user did really well — an iPhone user who had a weather application installed on the phone and used it to get the weather forecast in only 18 seconds (1/3 of the fastest speed from 2000).