Mountain View, California — Back in September last year, Google brought out a new service called Fast Flip to its Labs section. Despite some of its blemishes, Google is giving its experimental news reading application — which offers a way for people to easily skim through news content online in a way that is supposed to replicate the process of reading articles in print, is now part of the Google News homepage, according to the company’s announcement at its blog.
Just five months after its launch, this integration has not been done willy-nilly, but the project got a lot more traction in recent months when it enlisted a bunch of new publishers. The Fast Flip service, which has now been embedded to the bottom of the Google News home page, features screenshot of news webpages of all the major online medias as well as all the topic-related special journal outlets, so that readers can quickly browse through groups of stories, including those that are “most viewed” and most “recent.”
Making the announcement, Google said that Fast Flip has inspired readers “to view many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers’ websites.”
“Today you may notice a change to the Google News home page: Near the bottom, we are now showcasing stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service we launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we will continue to experiment with the format. But so far we have found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers’ websites,” Jack Hebert, Matthew Watson and Corrie Scalisi, all software engineers at Google, wrote.
Fast Flip empowers users to get through a lot more articles-reading feature that literally enables you to flip through different articles than you normally would in a simple and speedy interface.
In addition to displaying articles from a number of publications, now you can find Fast Flip articles from more than 90 different newspapers, TV and radio broadcasters, magazines, and blogs all the way to the bottom of the Google News Homepage. It is around 50% of the partner that Google added last year.
The application was launched long back in Google Labs to offer an alternative to the regular way of reading news. Considering the increasing tension between Google and the old-media news outlets, it was also a gesture of good will from the company.
It is a little bit like a digital copy of a magazine.
According to Google, the reason they have decided to make this service available to more users is because they were “encouraged by the positive feedback they have received from users and partners.”
Although the service still remains in Google Labs, the Mountain View-based company has just announced on its Official Google News Blog that it is a sign that Google considers the program to have been somewhat of a success. The blog entry reads, “so far we have found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers’ websites.”
Enjoy Fast Flip — now live on the Google News homepage.