Google Fast Flip

» see fastflip.googlelabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2009 I was reading the news the plain way, links and tabs on a TTNet line, mostly Turkish sites with a few English ones open in the background. Fast Flip was a different theory of reading entirely, and it was built around American newspapers I did not follow. Google Labs put it out that September at the TechCrunch50 conference as a way to browse news that felt more like flipping through a magazine than clicking through a list.

What it actually did was render each article's page as a picture. Instead of loading a website, you saw a shrunk image of the printed-looking layout, and you could riffle sideways through a stack of them fast, which is where the name came from. Stories were grouped by topic and by publication, and Google had signed up more than three dozen outlets, the New York Times and the Washington Post among them.

It never caught on. Two years later, in September 2011, Google shut Fast Flip down as part of a broad closing of Google Labs, the same sweep that killed the Aardvark question service it had bought. The product had partners and a clever demo and a good conference moment, and none of it turned into people who came back.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The images were the whole trick and the whole problem. Serving a page as a thumbnail made flipping feel instant, because you were paging through pictures rather than waiting on live sites. But a picture is not a webpage. You could not click a link inside it or select text, and to actually read a story you jumped out to the real article anyway. It was a nice preview grafted onto an ordinary click-through.

~ what it became ~

Fast Flip arrived a few months before the iPad, and the idea it was reaching for did not die with it. Flipboard launched in 2010 and made the flip-through-your-news gesture into a real habit on touchscreens, where swiping actually made sense. On a desktop with a mouse, riffling through page images was a solution looking for a problem. On a tablet it became the default way a lot of people read for years.

~ what came after ~

Google kept circling news readers long after this. It had Reader, then killed that too, then tried a couple of replacements before landing on the Google News app that most people use now. Fast Flip was an early sketch in that long line, the moment Google guessed that news wanted to look like paper. The guess was half right. It just needed a screen you touch, and a company willing to wait longer than two years.

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