The previously rumored Google news site “Flipper” is in fact launching today as “Fast Flip” in Google Labs. But maybe it should be called Google Skimmer because it permits people to move very quickly through lots of visually rich news pages from dozens of partner publications. According to the Google Blog Post:
Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip 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. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.
Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.
[Snip]
Instead, our focus was on the fundamentals of the experience. It is empowering to spread so much information out on a table, so we spread as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen. It is easier and more relaxing to scan a surface of information than flip through a stack, so information is laid out in a rigid two-dimensional grid. The sections do not flip into place; instead, they slide up and down. If you want to imagine the whole of the content as a giant uncut scroll of paper, don’t let us stop you.
The third release prototype has (according to the paper):
+ Improved Navigation
+ Arrow Keys: Even More Useful (Many users have expressed delight at being able to move around the article skimmer using the up and down arrow keys. Now you can move between pages using the left and right arrow keys.
+ The Addition of the Times Wire
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