Google Fast Flip is Google’s new way of distributing news content. Instead of the traditional aggregation of news headlines as shown on the Google News page, Fast Flip shows thumbnails of each newspaper on your screen. The experience is like viewing a newsstand.
So how does it work? Google capture images of the articles from their partners’ websites and then displays them in an easy-to-read view. The stories are grouped by categories, such as Entertainment, Business, Opinion, Politics and Most Viewed.
Readers can flip through stories quickly by simply pressing the left- and right-arrow keys until they find one that catches their interest. Clicking on the story takes them directly to the publisher’s website.
Since the site contains images, what seems like link buttons and hyperlinks will not work. You will need to click the image to go to that page to be able to access the real HTML page. Some of the images also trim out portions of the text inside the pages.
The page offers a voting mechanism for logged in users. Clicking on the “Like” button on a story page lodges a public vote for that story, which is one of the factors in whether Fast Flip includes stories the “Recommended” section. At the bottom of the home page, Fast Flip users who are signed in to their Google Account can see which stories friends in their Gmail contact list have “liked.”
The site is still in Beta under GoogleLabs: http://fastflip.googlelabs.com. Mobile users could view a mobile version of this service by this URL: http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/mobile.
Expect to see more developments from Google Fast Flip in the near future. It is exciting to see how Google competitors will compete with this service.
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