Google Fast Flip facts

Google has launched a new lab tool for listing all the news media on a single page. Many blogger posted this news on their blog, but rather than that I would like to discuss about the tool itself. Google says that Fast Flip is a web application which shares news and flips through pages online like magazine. Well what Google said is OK but when I visited the site I saw some strange issues.

Fast Flip has four categories: Sources, Popular, Sections and Topics. All these categories are expandable to the links related to these categories. On expanding these links it shows pages from the source of news. Once we click some news, it maximizes and we get nice sidebar to navigate through other pages.

I spotted that many pages listed, when maximize are cropped. It means we get only a part of the news in Fast Flip. To read full news Google has provides a link for full story. If you click this link for the full story it jumps to the website containing that story, that means you actually leave the Fast Flip. Now if you want to go back to Fast Flip you have to change the tab on the browser which is really frustrating process making Fast Flip a Slow Flip application. A best advantage of online media over print media is multimedia. I mean video news. Fast Flip shows the the pages from the news source as images so that the video on those pages can not play and they look like only images. Again defeating the fact that it combines quality of print and web media. This time Google has come up without text based advertisement. They are showing long and colorful advertisement for generating revenue. This advertisements are killing the Google's simplicity and cleanliness.

With Fast Flip Google for now shows news from limited number of publisher, I mean the publisher who has tied up with Google. Google will share it's revenue generated from the advertisement with these publishers.

While Google provides tips for using the Fast Flip like using arrow keys for navigating through stories to left or right, the loading of images and the flipping experience is wonderful.

The success of this tool can be decided later in future, but the effect of Fast Flip on Google News or vice-versa and finally how this effect will affect the news sites which depends on Google news will be an interesting mater.