Jasele Oita's Blog A weblog about everything

October 1, 2009

Google Tries to Reinvent the News with ‘Fast Flip’

Filed under: Internet — admin @ 4:31 am

Google thinks the news is too slow, and they might just be right. Twitter keeps you informed about breaking news, but click through any news site for a more detailed update and it does take a while for the page to load. Likewise, flash widgets, sidebars, twitter feeds and everything else you get on a usual news site equates to longer page load times.

To make accessing news much faster, Google News has come up with an interestingly new alternative they call Fast Flip. Part of Google Labs, Fast Flip is an experimental way of browsing the news which is almost similar to that of an old microfilm browser. Fast Flip displays news pages almost as if they were pages from a magazine, scrolling side-to-side. Loading time is absolutely fast as opposed to typical news sites. Fast Flip lets you browse according to popular topics, publisher, news section and many more. Currently the results are limited to only a small number of partners providing content. The list includes only three dozen publishers, but big names include The New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and Newsweek.

Fast Flip is cool to play around with it, but after a while you tend to notice to the downside of it, like for instance, a lack of working hyperlinks. So currently, Fast Flip has nothing to do with a better web browsing experience, but is just static images loaded on a novel interface that would only be exciting to someone who has never used the internet before. It does bring you the news faster, but coming from a company like Google who does understand the web, it is a bit hard to fathom.

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