Mountain View, California — Search engine giant Google on Monday unveiled a Labs project called “Google Fast Flip” that would allow news-hounds read Web pages of magazines and newspapers like they were flipping through an old-fashioned paper copy, featuring articles and stories from major media outlets, including the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post, the company announced on the Official Google Blog.
Google Fast Flip, a new service in testing for Google News. (Credit: Google)
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, plans to unveil a trial news reading service Google Fast Flip later on Monday at TechCrunch50, which the company expects will provide a financial lifeline for the revenue-hungry publishing industry.
Fast Flip, is a Google Labs project, developed on a core Google value: speed. It is designed to speed up the news browsing process by caching Web pages and presenting them more rapidly through a more user-friendly interface. Just as Apple’s CoverFlow interface aims to provide Mac, iPod, and iPhone users with a more intuitive music browsing interface, Fast Flip aims allow more efficient news consumption.
“Like a print magazine, Fast Flip allows you to browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers,” explains Google News researcher Krishna Bharat in a blog post. “As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.”
Google, which debuted Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco, equated using the quick-loading product to flipping through the pages of a magazine “really fast without unnatural delays.”
Fast Flip enables users to quickly browse through news stories from the websites of Google’s three dozen partners.
For example, a Web surfer can quickly be able to scroll from one article to the next using large arrows at speeds significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page. Readers will be able to glance through some of the story within a section of the Fast Flip site but will need to click through to the publisher’s Web site in order to read the full story.
Readers will be able to see a portion of the article, but will have to click through for the whole thing. Publishers will get a cut of the revenue from ads sold on the right hand rail. (Credit: Google)
Fast Flip is being tried out in association with 36 publishers, including The New York Times, Newsweek, and Salon.com, which will receive a part of the revenue from ads that Google plans to sell alongside Fast Flip pages.
“As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly browse through a lot of pages until you find something interesting,” Fast Flip developer Bharat, said in a blog post on Monday.
Other publisher’s providing content include magazines such as the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Newsweek and Popular Mechanics, as well as online news sites TechCrunch, Salon and Slate.
Google’s financial condition, at a time when the newspaper industry has been closing papers and laying people off, has put the company in the awkward position of having to reassure suffering publishers that it is a friend rather than a foe.
To address publisher concerns about life with less revenue, Fast Flip’s answer is more news. “The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet,” said Bharat. “However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution.”
Richard Gingras, CEO the Salon Media Group, says that the fascinating thing about Fast Flip is the exploration of a different user experience, one that is configured to make it easier for people to browse and find content online. “Moving from page to page on the Web is a sulky process compared to flipping the pages of a magazine,” he said. “Will serendipity become more of a factor if I can flip through more articles more quickly?”
Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times, labeled Fast Flip as “a modest R&D project” built as an research project to measure click-through rates and traffic, rather than some sort of revenue-generating venture. He declined to comment on how much revenue Google would be sharing with the paper.
Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by “topic,” by “publication” or by “most viewed,” “most popular” or even “recommended.”
The Mountain View, California-based Google has had a strained relationship with some US publishers and Bharat said the Internet company would share advertising revenue from Fast Flip with its media partners.
For the moment, Fast Flip is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com.