Friday, September 18, 2009

Newspapers and Magazines are Assimilated by Google FastFlip

GoogleLabs introduces a novel way to preview many periodicals at once.


Fast Flip Periodicals and Newspapers


Google Fast Flip



Google Fast Flip rapidly crawls and updates articles from major print magazines and news publishers. The display is rendered through Googles servers as still graphic which allows nearly any safe browsing with nearly all browsers including mobile devices.

Loosing The User


The article is linked to the source website of the publisher, however most users will likely stay on the Google image view.

This is perhaps a double edge sword for print publishers. On the one hand, news publishers may experience some new sources of traffic from Google users that would not otherwise found the article. However, the fact that users can stay within the Google image view of the article means less eyeballs on newspaper and magazine ads.

While this labs incarnation is in its infancy, I wouldn't be surprised to find fast flip a mainstream portal on desktops and mobile devices alike.