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Google's Fast Flip to enable easier news browsing
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 15 September 2009, 23:45 IST
Bangalore: Google has launched its latest product called Fast Flip which will allow users to easily go through news articles on the internet. With the help of Fast Flip, readers can glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, which can significantly slow the rendering of articles, especially if they have multimedia content. But if users click on a Fast Flip link, they will be taken to the corresponding publisher's web site, where Fast Flip would not work. The basic idea behind this is to try and replicate the simplicity in which a readers flips newspaper pages. Google says that this will attract more readers and increase revenue of the publishers.
Readers can go through the news from 36 publishers including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon and Newsweek. Currently, Fast Flip will only feature content from the publishers Google has been working with to develop the technology, but it plans to add more in the future.
Fast Flip will also feature a search engine and let users share content. Based on their reading choices, users will see suggestions for other articles they might find interesting. "On the web you can go page to page, but it takes five to 10 seconds between pages, so it's not as 'browseable' an experience as with print, where you flip through and scan a lot of things very quickly. This is one experiment, and it'll be interesting to see what we learn" said Richard Gingras, CEO of the Salon Media Group.
Many publishers have been trying out various things to make it easier for readers to find more articles. Salon will soon start a beta test to organize content by topics, so readers can scan articles about the same subject. "Any publisher these days has to be looking at how to create interesting units of content and facilitate the use and access of that content in as many ways as the audience is willing to consume them," Gingras said.
Google knows that it is possible that this product might not become a big product. "We know that Google Fast Flip isn't perfect, and there's a chance it may never become a full-blown Google product. But we think there are some interesting ideas behind it," said a spokesman for Google via e-mail to Computer World.
