New in Google Labs - Read news fast with Google Fast Flip

[Robert Charlton]

Read news fast with Google Fast Flip [googleblog.blogspot.com]
Official Google Blog
9/14/2009

...Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs [googlelabs.com]: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com [fastflip.googlelabs.com]. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers....

...To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads....

[fastflip.googlelabs.com...]

[aristotle]

I did a couple of searches and in each case it returned a lot of screen shots of recent newspaper articles. But the print in the screen shots is too small to read, so you have to click to actually see the article. Also, it only shows the first page of the article, so you have to visit the site to read the rest. Apparently the main advantage is speed in finding relevant articles.

[physics]

Interesting. I think it's very positive that they partnered with the publishers on this.

[ergophobe]

I think the format is also key - you can't scroll and get the whole article from the Google interface. It will be interesting to see if that format increases or decreases publisher page views. On the one hand, I get the gist of the article without clicking, on the other
- I get sucked in to a specific article
- I get sucked in to flipping through articles

(I guess I have three hands...)

[StupidScript]

I find it easier to browse than a simple list of topics, but obviously there needs to be a lot more interaction with me to go through the same number of articles, which makes it less useful to me when I am cruising news while eating a sandwich.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Speed is obviously a big plus here.

[jaiganeshv]

Its nice. I would say a bigger sized Google Gadget...