Tech Talk

Internet giant Google has just launched its new news service – the Fast Flip online news reader. The new online news service allows users to consume news more quickly. It is called Fast Flip because it simulates the readers flick through magazines and newspapers.

Fast Flip will feature stories from major media outlets, like BBC, The New York Times, The Washington post and other news providers to which Google has teamed up with. Google Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco.

“As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting,” Fast Flip developer Krishna Bharat, a Google engineer, said in a blog post on Monday.

Some of the companies supplying content to Fast Flip include magazines such as the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Newsweek and Popular Mechanics, as well as online news sites TechCrunch, Salon and Slate.

Google recently was called a parasite for making money aggregating content it did not create.

Google vice-president of search Marissa Mayer said, “I don’t believe we are part of the problem. I believe we are part of the solution. We have tried to build platforms and tools that build a healthy, rich eco-system online that is supportive of content. This is a new way of looking at content.”

Fast Flip will serve contextual adverts around the screenshots and publishers who have signed up to provide content to the service will share in the revenue. Mayers said that it is a proof that they (Google) is keen to help the industry at a time when it was clearly struggling.

With the online news service, Google is actually driving traffic to the publishers’ websites, as it only shows the first page of a story. Users who want to read more have to click through the website of the host publication.

At present, the service is still considered an experimental “Google Labs” products. To sample the service, check it out fastflip.googlelabs.com.