Not satisfied controlling almost every advertisement on almost every website in the world,Google has decided that it's going to cut the middleman out of its advertising revenue, the middleman being the content providers for the sites their advertising is on.
How are they going to do this? It appears to be through a new service under development in the Google Labs, called fast flip. Fast flip takes an image of a particular site, at this stage it appears to be only news, and then posts the image with their own advertising into the fast flip service.
Now, they don't usually show the full article and they are showing an image of the website and not content cut directly from the website, so there is probably just enough protection to be able to claim fair use of your site content while depriving you of any ad revenue for content. This is because a lot of the time you can get enough information from that snippet of your article to not need to actually click through to the full article. In my own browsing for example, I only clicked through to one article of the 20+ that I browsed. In almost every case, I didn't quite get the full article, but I got enough that it wasn't worth the hassle of loading another page to finish reading it.
With a newsfeed page with lots of links, we need to click through one link to get to the full article, but fast flip makes us click through two pages to get to the full article, one of which has half the article and Google's advertising.
So not only is it not faster, but Google is depriving the content producer of all revenue on their articles much, if not most of the time. I am fairly confident that this will do a damn good job of reducing the amount of useful content that is produced, because authors who aren't getting paid tend to stop writing anything that requires a serious investment of time and energy.
Google is really starting to look like one of those vines that strangles the tree that it is living on, killing both of them. Because the more that they try to chase profit at all costs, the more they are damaging the usefulness of the Internet, which in turn can't help but impact negatively on their profits.
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