DailyTech went to Google Fast Flip and took it for a spin.  Basically, the site works as a preview engine, publishing articles from several sources as PNG format images, which you can scroll through via arrows on the left and right of the frame.  Like Google News, both top stories and news by categories are offered.

While the service indeed allows for fast reading, it has several major annoyances.  The first is that you have to click a link to get the full story -- the Fast Flip only gives you a page-sized screenshot of the story (how about a scroll option, Google?).  Second, you get less stories than Google News, both in terms of number of articles, and sources (only select partners show up).  Finally, the switch lags just enough that it doesn't really feel "fast" -- something that PC World's David Coursey also notes.

The upsides are that if you just want to scan bits of the story, you can often get the gist of the story from the excerpt, in which case the service could, in theory, speed up your read times.  Another upside is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive, with no ad-words present on the articles we viewed.

Google hopes to gain both advertising money and greater control over advertising content with the new service.  For that reason they're giving their partners -- TechCrunch, The New York Times, Fast Company and Business Week (and others -- 39 in total, with DailyTech not currently being a member) -- a share of the ad revenue from Fast Flip ad clicks.  In this respect, Google is placing itself as the middleman for online news advertising, even more so than with Google News.  This is a deal with the devil, in a sense, for publications as they may gain revenue, but they'll lose control of advertising on at least part of their traffic.

Some aren't very hot on Google Fast Flip.  The aforementioned Mr. Coursey comments, "Google's new Fast Flip news-er interface is a bit of a puzzle. It doesn't seem very fast and also doesn't flip pages, but slides them across the screen...Fast Flip has, for now, limited itself to a fairly narrow set of partner publications. This will suck if Fast Flip becomes the standard Google newsreader and the publications you like aren't included."

At DailyTech we're a bit more reserved about the new service.  While it's no Google News, it does have its strengths.  And it seems unlikely that the Google would kill Google News and replace it with Fast Flip.  Google Fast Flip is a fun toy to try out and see if it helps your news reading -- try it yourself and draw your own conclusions.