I’ve only played with Google’s new Fast Flip newsreading feature for a few minutes, but I’ve already got one major problem with it: it’s hard to scan headlines. When you think about it, that’s something that reading a paper newspaper still lets you do — you open up a double-sided broadsheet and you’re scanning over probably 5 or 6 stories on the inside, depending on the number of advertisements. If you scan down the front page or the main page of a section, you can see the headlines for 8-10 stories. With Fast Flip, the “scanning” view is a bunch of screen caps of the articles you’re about to look at, with the headline in small print underneath. Scanning this list of screen caps isn’t that informative because the shrunken headlines are hard to read.

Contrast this with the front page of Google News or something like Techmeme or memeorandum and you’ll see what I mean.

Now I get that Fast Flip is designed for you to click into one of the streams of articles and then use the left/right arrows to page through it, but this causes me to “zoom in” conceptually and doesn’t really let me stand back and see all the headlines from a distance. So I can have the experience of “flipping” from page to page and not knowing in advance anything about what I’m going to see next (other than some basics of subject matter), or I can scan small headlines all at once. Doesn’t feel like the greatest compromise in the world.

For me, I’m still deciding if I like this or not. I’m a big fan of graphic design and I like that Fast Flip offers an opportunity for that to shine through earlier in the reading process than it can on something like Google News or Techmeme, but I’m not sure if that outweighs the benefit of being able to move fast through a large number of headlines.