Google Introduces Fast Flip News Reading Services

On Monday, September 14, Google (Labs) introduced an experimental news hub called Fast Flip. Google is attempting to make it easier for readers to read newspaper and magazine articles on-line.

Google's new service has approximately three dozen publishers participating in this experiment. Publishers include major news services like BBC News, Washington Post, New York Times, and Newsweek; some magazines include Good Housekeeping, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire.

Google will share resulting revenue with publishers by placing ads around the news articles.

Fast Flip is available at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Articles appear as a collection of images of news articles that have been collected from Google's partner sites. The articles appear side-by-side on the page and arranged by popularity and categories.

Flipping between articles is quick and easy; readers can zoom into a specific article, section or publication. The majority of articles can be read directly on Google; clicking on the content will take you directly to the publisher's site.

Some publishers have agreed that Google's experiment could be useful and Fast Flip could compete with other news web sites. Fast Flip could help showcase sites like BBC News and New York Times better than current news aggregators.

There have been other endeavors to make electronic news reading more efficient but attempts have only gained some acceptance. The Times Reader, for example is an application that is downloaded onto a computer and allows users to read articles in newspaper format.

Google will also offer a version of Fast Flip to be used with some cell phones and may also allow news publishers to use the technology on their sites.