Google has unveiled its "Fast Flip" online news reader. featuring stories from BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating.
Google added today a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at 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 users browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so users can quickly look through a lot of pages until they find something interesting.
At the same time, Google is providing aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for each user, by taking cues from selections someone has made make to show more content from sources, topics and journalists relative to each users' taste.
To build Google Fast Flip, Google partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These companies will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content.
"The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future," Gogole said in a blogpost.
The company has also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so users can browse on the go.
Fast Flip is considered an experimental "Google Labs" product. It is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com.