Google Currents: the key is production

So Google released their 'Currents' mobile app the other day. At first glance it looks like a number of other swishy, turn-your-newsfeeds-into-a-magazine style apps: flipbook etc.  So is this just an update to Google Reader?  After all, you can select your existing GReader feeds to add to your, uh, magazine rack, in addition to the showcased titles.  Well, yes and no.

It is definitely a more narrative reading experience than Google Reader: pick your site/magazine, and you can flip through it page by page, or pull up the contents bar to hop to sections you prefer. The layout is magazine boxes, with pictures, rather than lists of headings.  So Google are giving the reader a more tablet-friendly experience on their existing newsfeeds.  But why that showcase content?  Huffington Post, Forbes etc. all have apps content icons (appzines?) on there.  Are they seriously trying to compete with the Flipbooks and Pulses of this world?  And what about all those publishers with their own apps, like the FT and Economist?  Just what is the point?

Well, I stumbled upon the Google Currents Producer this morning and it all became clear: the power of Google Currents is not in its output, but in the ease of production.  Bloggers and content managers, amateur and pro, who have invested hours and money on buffing up their blogs to pixel perfection only to have them shredded by crap formatting on tablets and phones, now have a tool with which they can create a tablet- and phone-friendly appzine in minutes.  We're not just talking RSS feed aggregation, either: Google Docs, Youtube vids, Google+, photo streams... basically you can curate your life as an edition, broken down into rights-controlled sections (of articles, photos, videos, news feeds, social feeds etc.) and publish it, magazine-style, via Currents.

It's good for consumers, but it's great for producers.  And that could be the key difference.  Especially if they put in-app payments into this thing: imagine being able to charge micropayments by the section.