Google recently opened up its new experiment from Google Labs, called Fast Flip, to the users. It's a new way of reading news, the difference here is, it shows screen grabs and gives a magazine feel. But, it's neither a complete feed reader nor a full-fledged online magazine.

It's more like showing screen grabs of Google News, but then again it doesn't show news from all available sources!! Well, I can hear you gnawing your teeth by now. But the catch is that for now Google has collaborated with a handful of magazines and newspapers, so the information present in these would be categorized and shown.

Google also plans to share the revenue that it gets from showing relevant ads with the publishers, which might be a good move on its part since they have been not-so-kind with Google, for eating away their revenue pie, by providing news for free!

While the whole concept of Fast Flip might seem appealing to visually inclined people like me, I would still prefer Google News any given day!

On a relative note, I'd like to mention two sites that attempt the similar kind of concept - presenting information in a more visual format. One is a news aggregator called "Newsmap" and the other a visual search engine called "Spezify".



Newsmap categories the news from Google News and displays them in coloured blocks, each representing the category it belong to and also how new the content is. More information on Newsmap can be found here


Spezify is a search engine that presents the results in a visual format. It sources information from Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, eBay etc..so, we have a amalgamation of information from photos to videos to text. It may not be a complete alternative to the regular search engines, but its still worth a try.