Google has unveiled an experimental news reading service called Fast Flip from its lab. Krishna Bharat, the engineer who created Google News, describes it on the Google News blog as follows –
“Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.” He adds, “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.”
Fast Flip is designed to drive traffic and revenue to online news sites, for supporting news publishers facing financial trouble. Some three dozen publishers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and sibling Newsweek, Salon and The Daily Beast have agreed to use their site content with logos and graphical images.
People surfing the corresponding page can flip through content quickly, and move to the original site by clicking on the image. Visitors can sort out news under recent, most viewed, recommended and headlines, and see news under various sections like Politics, Business, Sports, Entertainment etc. Also users can watch news based on sources.
Apart from helping the news industry by driving traffic to their site, Google has also promised to share their revenue from contextual advertising.