Google launches "Fast Flip"

11:50 PM // 0 comments // ngsk // Category: Google , News , Technology //

What you get from word “Fast Flip”, just you may be getting like a fast glance by turning pages randomly. It is just like a microfilm reader.

Internet giant Google on Monday released an online news reader called "Fast Flip" that makes it possible to see a curate set of content sites using a physical "turn the pages" metaphor, featuring stories from the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media outlets.

Google, which launched Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco, compared using the quick-loading product to flipping through the pages of a magazine ", pages are cached by Google and load very quickly."

Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed really fast. But it still feels forced.

A large arrow allows a Web surfer to quickly jump from one article to the next upto 30 articles, significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page. You can quickly flip forward or back through pages, or jump to a particular page by clicking on its thumbnail view.

The sources of content are follows.

BBC News	FRONTLINE	Newsweek
TechCrunch	Billboard	Fast Company
Popular Mechanics	Technology Review	Business Week
Foreign Policy	ProPublica	Teen
Center for Investigative Reporting	Good Housekeeping	Quick & Simple
The Atlantic	Center for Public Integrity	Harper's Bazaar
Redbook	The Daily Beast	Christian Science Monitor
House Beautiful	SPIN	The Daily Green
CosmoGirl	Marie Claire	Salon
Us Magazine	Cosmopolitan	Men's Journal
Seventeen	Veranda	ELLE
National Review Online	Slate	Washington Post
Esquire	New York Times	Smithsonian

Fast Flip also displays Google ads alongside publisher content so "Partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads, but this scheme does take control over advertising away from publishers" Fast Flip developer Krishna Bharat, a
Google engineer, said in a blog post.

Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by topic, by publication or by what is most viewed or most popular.

However as this is a good experiment, t has its drawbacks.In Fast Flip, neither standard Web rules nor print layout concepts apply. For
example, in Fast Flip, you can only scan left and right (page by page). You can't read down the page. If you click anywhere on the page, you leave Fast Flip and go to the original Webpage on the source site. Links on the page don't work. And multimedia doesn't work on the page either. Fast Flip previews are, in fact, flat graphics files, which explain their lack of interactivity.

I agree with the Fast Flip designers that loading pages takes too long and that caching pages in a Web app is a good way to bring speed back to content browsing. But can we do it with real pages instead of static graphics? Second, the idea that there's a recommended linear reading order of pages on a site is intriguing, even if the order is simply chronological. But I don't think readers want to be locked in to that order. How about we give readers standard forward and back
content navigation buttons (not browser forward and back) to take them through a site in addition to the hyperlinks they're used to?

Fast Flip is clearly an experiment, and as I said, if it gets more people to read online content, I'll applaud it for that alone. But I'm not going to actually like it from a technical perspective, or as a user, until it gives publishers, designers, and readers more control over their content.

– A statement give by the Rafe Needleman, editor of CNET's Webware.