Digging AP's edgy Timeline Viewer

AP's Timeline Viewer offers a fun way to consume news of your choice. Simply mouse over a story and up pops a summaryI've been playing around with AP's Timeline Viewer, a new platform for consuming news that's built in HTML5.

Timeline Viewer is in beta, but is pretty polished out of the box. It was launched in conjunction with the release of the new Internet Explorer 9 browser, a product built with HTML5 in mind.

The experience is pretty straightforward: A nav bar on the left allows you to choose your content stream from 1 to 10 main categories like U.S. News, World, Sports, Entertainment, Technology, even the ever-popular Wacky News.

Those selections are then loaded into the main viewing area, sorted by date. When you mouseover an item, a summary pops up. If you want to read more or see an enlarged photo, you just click again, which takes you to a story page. Once on a story page, you can either click back to the main page or click back or forth through all the stories in your categories. Favorite stories can be added to a personal queue to be read later.

Story views are large and easy to read. For me, Timeline Viewer is a great showcase for HTML5 but builds on earlier experiments like Google Timeline and platforms like TweetDeck and Flipboard. The influence of tablet usability is pretty obvious, as well. I can see Timeline Viewer being a hit because of its intuitive navigation is perfect for touchscreens.

Each category is color-coded to make it easier to see particular stories on the main page, but the labeling is so subtle it's not very useful. And, while the timeline can be effective navigation in spots, I found the choces in the left nav to be a better way to browse. Perhaps my behavior will change with repeated daily use and more stories showing up each day but for now, sorting by date is secondary, not primary.

Timeline Viewer is optimized for IE9, but because I'm writing this on a Mac, I have no idea how it actually looks in IE9. I do know it looks pretty good on Chrome and the screengrabs above are from Firefox. I found the resolution on Safari to be spotty for some reason. But it's in beta, so no biggie.

AP says its Timeline Viewer "experiment" will last about 6 months. Presumably at that point they'll a nifty tablet app, and maybe something to license to their partners.

One thing that's noticeably absent: Advertising. Yeah, why let something like that get in the way. But that may be something AP will be testing in the coming months. There are more than enough advertising options within the viewer. If AP is daring, they may find an ethically appropriate way to weave the advertising into the content mix. I have ideas on how they could make that work.

All in all, this is a great product that shows a lot of promise. AP's iPhone app was a trendsetter for smartphones, and I can see this fighting Flipboard, FLUD and PulseReader for attention of iPad and tablet readers.

It's also a path that we're looking at closely for redesigns coming to Bakersfield.com. We have some really cool content widgets that will surface a variety of content in new ways. HTML5 and inspirations like Timeline Viewer and Flipboard may inspire the design layer that goes on top. Stay tuned.