Did Google Just Make a News E-Reader For Tablets Out Of Fast Flip?

Google yesterday introduced Fast Flip, a web app which is basically screen shots of news websites that you can easily flip through rapidly and are organized by topic categories. As Google explains, one of the problems with newspaper and magazine sites is their inability to load quickly, an obstacle that Google sees in trying to scan headlines and content like you would when holding a newspaper or magazine. Now with Fast Flip, you can scan headlines and read articles just like flipping through pages of the real McCoy. Part of the success of a product like this would rest on how quickly these “slides” would load, and Google has done an excellent job at this end. In addition, there’s also a mobile version for Android devices and the iPhone.

On a touchscreen tablet, such an application most certainly makes it more easier to view headlines and read the first few paragraphs than clicking on links and waiting for them to load.  An easy application, it is another why-didn’t-I-think-of-that service from Google that attempts to make lives easier…or busier.

With Fast Flip, some may say that Google is closing the gap between publishers and digital media. It can also be seen as upping the ante on its war against Amazon’s Kindle, first with Google Book partnerships and now with Fast Flip. Steve Jobs could be correct – dedicated devices like the Kindle e-reader, which can’t browse the web, might end up losing while tablets that can do both will win. But Google is not the only one that realized that readers require newspaper-like experience on the web. The New York Times’ Times Reader, which requires a subscription fee of $3.45 a week, is also a similar application though its a desktop app that runs on Adobe Air and can only view NYT articles.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Analysis, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.