14 DAY TRIAL // Despite some of its flaws, Google seems determined to turn Fast Flip, the experimental news-reading app, into a success. It is still not polished enough to leave Google Labs, but it has gotten a lot more exposure, as it is now featured on the Google News homepage albeit at the very bottom. The change isn't entirely unexpected, as the project got a lot more traction last month when it enlisted a bunch of new publishers.
"Today you may notice a change to the Google News home page: Near the bottom, we're now displaying stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service we launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites," Jack Hebert, Matthew Watson and Corrie Scalisi, all software engineers at Google, wrote.
Fast Flip enables users to get through a lot more articles than they normally would thanks to a simple and speedy interface. It serves articles from a number of publications, more than 90 after the last count, and it is designed to allow users to 'flip' though the articles like the pages of a magazine or newspaper, hence the name. The tool was launched several months ago in Google Labs to offer an alternative to the regular way of consuming news. Considering the increasing tension between Google and the old-media news outlets, it was also a gesture of good will from the company.
Recently, Google significantly upped the number of publishers the service supported, going from 40 to over 90 organizations. The product is apparently so popular that Google is introducing it on the front page of its news-aggregation service, Google News. It's buried at the bottom of the page, but, even so, it's clear that Fast Flip will get a lot more exposure on the heavily trafficked page.