TC50: Google Fast Flip scrolls through the web like the pages of a magazine

With a new product called Google Fast Flip demonstrated to a live audience at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, Google says it’s combining the speed and smoothness of the magazine-reading experience with the breadth of information that you can find on the web. The service is launching right now in Google’s experimental Labs Area.

Fast Flip is a new way to look at a bunch of news articles, a la Google news, but then flip through them as if you were flipping through the pages of a magazine. When you click on a specific article, you see a close-up of the first page, but with large arrows on the right and left. Click on the arrows and Fast Flip slides a related article into view, without the normal delays in loading time. Once you find an article that you like, you can click on it and see the original web page. You can also flip through articles from a specific publication or author.

Google has already partnered with publications including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, and TechCrunch50 organizer TechCrunch, which leaked a screenshot of the service a few months ago, when it was code-named Flipper.

The product was demonstrated on-stage by Google’s Marissa Mayer, Google News inventor Krishna Bharat, and others, at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. They say that by speeding up the news browsing process, Google hopes to encourage people to read more news, so news publciations will be able to serve more ads.

There are mobile versions of Fast Flip for phones that use Google’s Android operating system, as well as for iPhones.