Google Fast Flip is an online news aggregator web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It was launched in beta by Google Labs. Fast Flip provides a new reading experience that combines qualities of print and the Web. 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. 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. At the same time, Google provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community.
Google Fast Flip presents images of stories from Google’s news partners, which can be clicked on to navigate to the story on the news provider’s own website. Stories can be scrolled between using the mouse or cursor keys.
Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is personalized.
To build Fast Flip, Google partnered with three dozen top publishers in U.S., including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company and Newsweek. Now there are approximately 98 news partners, full list available here. Google hope to add more publishers in the future. Google says it will share the majority of revenue from contextual adverts with its news partners.
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Google have also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so mobile phone users can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.
How does Google Fast Flip work?
Google captures images of the articles on our partner publishers’ websites and then display them in an easy-to-read way. The stories are grouped by categories, such as Entertainment, Business, Opinion, Politics and Most Viewed. Readers can flip through stories quickly by simply pressing the left- and right-arrow keys until they find one that catches their interest. Clicking on the story takes them directly to the publisher’s website. Users can also search for any subjects they want and basically create their own topics, almost like a custom magazine, on the fly.
Google Fast Flip allows readers to vote on an article to tell the world they liked it. Clicking on the “Like” button on a story page lodges a public vote for that story, which is one of the factors in whether Fast Flip includes stories the “Recommended” section. At the bottom of the home page, Fast Flip users who are signed in to their Google Account can see which stories friends in their Gmail contact list have “liked.” [Google help, Google blog]
Even though Fast Flip shows Google’s power in News Market, it receives mostly negative reviews as it is focusing more on the needs of publishers than of readers.Whats your take on Google Fast Flip? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
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