The Fastest Flip Alive

Coming from a journalism background, I 'm fascinated by traditional print companies arduous and, often, antagonistic transition to the web. Magazine and newspaper publishers view themselves as producers of a product when they should be applying a modern view. Print publishers are keepers, traffickers and recorders of information. They are content companies plain and simple. The industry has been slow to embrace that ideology and, subsequently, the web, like their music counterparts, because the new business model is far less lucrative than the print model, but the reasons behind the economics is another topic entirely.

News sites endure a love/hate relationship with Google. The search engine is the great reader gateway to their content if the company successfully navigates the SEO labrynith, which raises the hits and visitor counts tremendously. But Google also is accused of stealing content on the guise of news aggregation and collection, which hurts the traffic and content exclusivity of sites. In what appears to be a handshake in the direction of a happy medium, Google Labs has introduced Fast Flip. And like all Google products, feels like a hit out of the box.

The idea behind Fast Flip is for viewers to scroll through a horizontal line of articles like flipping through an issue of Time magazine. Various screen grabs of articles are displayed left-to-right on a horizontal rail. Readers use the navigation tools to slide the images in either direction for a visual sampling of that site's contents. Instead of a list of headlines, readers can judge the article on a combination of headline, site design, images and any other bell or whistle the site includes. Also, users can't read the full story in the Fast Flip frame. They must click on the page to trackback to the originating site for the full story.

I'm not sure if Fast Flip will catch on but a number of major media companies are participating. Some more enthusiastically than others. But you can already see the possibilities with the slick design. The side-scrolling is perfect for finger walking on the iPhone for example. Once you can customize a page for the sites and content you browse on daily basis, there will be another viable alternative technique for web browsing.

Give it a try.