Will readers flip over Google FastFlip?

There was a lot of buzz this week about Google's latest lab experiment Google FastFlip. This is technology that enables you to flip through publications very quickly to glance at headlines and see what you want to read. Google describes it as follows:

"Like a print magazine, FastFlip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. 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."

Google has partnered directly with several dozen publishers for this venture including such luminaries as the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic, to name but a few. Since they are providing even more content than on Google News, the idea, I suppose is to share revenue with the publishers, but as ReadWriteWeb points out in this post, the advertising so far, seems to consist of a single ad per page. At that rate, publishers aren't going to get rich, especially with people flipping quickly through the content.

From a technology perspective, it's an interesting if not novel approach. This type of technology has existed for years from companies like Zinio, Nxtbook and Zmags. While it does provide a way to flip through the news quickly, I'm not sure how much users really want this type of technology, although it may appeal to people who are looking to review online publications in the same fashion they do print ones.

One application where this could be very useful is inside Google Reader, where you could flip through the blog posts for a given folder quickly and easily, but I have my doubts that this is going to be very useful for publishers in the long run, who want you to stop and read the stuff, not just go flipping by.

For more information:
- see the Google blog post

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