Today Google’s launching Fast Flip: a new tool that enables fast previewing of several online newspaper pages.

Google Fast Flip Screenshot

According to the post of Krishna Bharat on the Official Google Blog:

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’s Michael Arrington, a TechCrunch correspondent, interviews Marissa Meyer, Google’s VP for Search Products & User Experience regarding Fast Flip. She says Google shares the ad-generated revenue with publishers. On the last part of the interview she points out how social network could monetize.

I think this is quite a useful toy but, I’d like to see it applied in different contexts. For instance, I’d really like to see a Fast Flip-enabled Google Reader. They could phase in the revenue scheme by providing an option on Google AdSense where you agree about your pages been shown on Google Reader with a screen shot. A further way in which Google could enhance previewing things could be to provide small podcasts read with a text to speech engine (there are many developed by Loquendo or AT & T).

With regard to the product itself I think it is pretty fast and usable but lacks some features such as: the “Share it” / “Tweet it” button, the ‘add star’ icon, and the print view.