Back in June, we broke the news that Google was working on a new visual way to display Google News then called “Flipper.” Today, at the TechCrunch50 conference, Google’s Marissa Mayer formally launched the product now known as Google Fast Flip.
As we wrote previously, the service puts a new face on Google News. Imagine going to a newsstand and looking at all the magazines lined up, only here, it’s screenshots of actual articles. And while the thumbnails are small initially, you can click to zoom in on any of them and actually see how it looks on the actual page. Obviously, you can click-through to read the entire article on its actual site.
The name “Fast Flip” comes from the idea that with this visual look, you can easily flip through the news. If you find an article you like that looks interesting, you click through to read it, if not, just flip left or right to go to another. And it is fast. Really fast.
If you do like an article, there is a “like” button, similar to that functionality on FriendFeed and Facebook (the smiley face is built into the logo). You can also easily email any article to a friend. Obviously, as this is Google, there is also search functionality built into Fast Flip.
One interesting aspect of this is that it’s likely to reward sites and authors that use good visuals (which I’d like to think I do) in their stories. Also, the more you use Google Fast Flip, the smarter it will get to things you like.
Not all publishers will like the idea of Google doing this, as news companies such as the AP love to complain about the amount of content that can be legally shown as an excerpt in places like Google News. These Fast Flip thumbnails show much more content than a regular Google News search result excerpt, but only pages from publishers who opt into this service will be shown. And those publishers will get a share of the revenues from ads shown beside their content on Fast Flip. TechCrunch is an initial partner as are others like BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and US Weekly, among others.
There is also an iPhone-optimized interface for Google Fast Flip.
Google was nice enough to point out our initial scoop of this news today at the TechCrunch50 conference. Interestingly enough, “flipper” is still in their Google Labs URL. And you’ll also notice the “Google confidential!” in the image below.
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Other Coverage
Google News 2.0: Fast Flip Screenwerk.
Google Tries to Enhance News Browsing With Fast Flip PC World.
Google launches Fast Flip news website Telegraph.
Google unveils Fast Flip for newspapers and magazines LA Times.
Google turns a new page in online news content Times Online.
Google Launches Fast Flip To Accelerate News Browsing Information Week.
Google’s Fast Flip Trick Reuters.
Google lets readers “flip” through the news USA Today.
Google’s Fast Flip Dips Publishers’ Toes in Google’s Own Ad Revenues Content Bridge.
Breaking: Google FastFlip Web Search Android Guys.
Google hopes readers will ‘flip’ over new format SeattlePI.
Google Releases News-Reading Service New York Times.
Google Fast Flip Goes Live; Experiment In News Reading And Revenue Sharing paidContent.
Google Fast Flip: Reading Online a Bit More Like Print Businessweek.
Wow MG. They haven’t even started yet.
Best way to deny news websites their ad revenue. We know how google respects copyrights, let me remind you youtube.
Google Fast Flip for Google News?
Nice feature to have a quick review, walk through interesting articles and online news. Hope Google brings out innovations to GoogleNews to beat Onion.
Expecting more new add ons to GoogleNews.
And that screenshot looks old
yep updated with better ones.
Really nice, I have already started using it. It was sort of thing i was looking for.
Love the concept because it approximates how we browse magazines… ie. we can keep “moving on” to the next page/article by repeatedly clicking on the next arrow.
Unlike normal web pages where we need to hunt for the “next page” link.
This makes the experience much more fluid.
One thing that’s not mentioned here is the possibility of “friendly” full page ads.
Do you realize that ads are actually enjoyable on magazines, vs online… especially lifestyle mags like GQ/Cosmo… they almost feel like content.
Now that there’s a quick way to breeze through content, people won’t mind full page ads, because they know they can “flip through” them easily instead having to hunt for the “close” button.
This looks like SearchMe applied to news articles.
I wonder if a patent troll bought up SearchMe’s IP as they’d definitely be knocking on Google’s doors down the road if this proves to be successful.
Man, I was on facebook and read your update. I just wanted to leave a wee little comment and got redirected to this page. I HATE THAT! Why can’t I comment and share without leaving my facebook page? This sucks.
Have a good day.
When you click to read the full article, do you get a redirect notice or is it just me? Rather annoying…
i think they just bulldozed like 10 companies in the demo pit.
Google releasing an iPhone app but no Android app?!
I’m definitely going to use that for the iPhone when I need to kill a few minutes. So far as delivering news, this visual sectormap (http://newsmap.jp) is a far better tool.
In my opinion Google should wake up and restart real innovations.
This is nice to have, and I would expect that from a TC50 startup, not from Google.
The visual search from Bing is 100x better. Not even sure of what the googles version is supposed to accomplish. Another #googlefail, but as long as they have billions of dollars they can keep looking.
I agree with you. I hate MSFT but I must admit that recently, Google is just doing nothing but cashing in on ad revenues. I don’t care about having Marissa playing around, but what are the engineers doing???
After the Bing Visual Search presentation today morning. One of the judges advice/comment was some thing to the order of…
“… if you start adding images and graphics just for the niche of it.. once the niche fades after a few days nobody will use it…visual presentation of data is only applicable to certain contexts like shopping, products etc.. and should not be used elsewhere..”
I think Google fast flip exactly falls into the category where visual presentation is unnecessary and does not add value. The user cant even read an excerpt of the article being displayed with out clicking through once and a lot of space is wasted to display stuff that the user cant even read. It works for articles with images, but for articles with lot of text its a complete waste.
Is there a link that you can provide so I can get to the service easily?
http://flipper.googlelabs.com
Seems more like a knock-off of Stumbleupon and not something really innovative.
Another way for google to collect Ad revenue for your content.
I want to be able to view my Google Reader like this.
hahahahaaa Google is being Bing jealous
I thought the newseum (in DC) had a cool twist early on…
http://www.news...daysfrontpages/
Almost useless as I have to click and go to the remote site to read all the article.
Rendering entire pages on my site as images and hosting them on Google is a step too far, IMO.
Prior art from 3 years back – http://www.fastdigg.com
Thanks for sharing. Just looked at it. The difference is that Fast Flip is rendering the image of the complete web page whereas fastdigg is showing only a snippet. Where they overlap is the method of going to the next page.
It looks prettier but it’s not very functional. You can only work out what the story is about if the TEXT headline is big enough to see and I guess that depends on what each site does with its h1 tags. As far as choosing stories to read further goes, Google News and RSS readers have much more efficient interfaces.
I also agree with those who have posted about ad revenues. I don’t think media companies will like this at all.
Google Fast flip is a delight to use on the iPhone! http://bit.ly/JWPM9
strange name..LOL
Good stuff Google.
Google’s Fast Flip or Fast Flop?
http://bit.ly/1Jk5R3