Do you miss the serendipity of discovering interesting stories in your morning paper? Are you tired of slow-loading newspaper websites? Are you sick of newspapers whining about Google? Well, here’s a solution to all three problems.
Google Labs has partnered with several major news publications to release Google Fast Flip, a service that lets you browse fast-loading screenshots of news articles from major online news outlets. Google will share ad revenue with publishers, while personalization algorithms will monitor your flipping habits to try and flip up articles actually relevant to you.
A tactile version of the service is coming to the iPhone and Android-based phones, so your fingers should get a flipping workout. This won’t replace my highly-targeted iGoogle page anytime soon, but it will provide the casual newspaper-flipping experience we used to enjoy with dead trees — except you get less sucky articles, and less ink on your fingers. If that’s your kind of thing, old-timer, then fast-flip away.
Originally posted on September 15, 2009 @ 9:58 am