A few weeks we commented on Fast Flip - Google's news aggregation service that many in the industry view with high hopes. Despite some glowing initial PR, publishers appear to finally be getting the message that Google's offering may not ultimately be in their best interest, as pointed out in this story in today's San Francisco Chronicle.

Here is part of the story:

"I don't necessarily see it as a game changer," said Randy Bennett, senior vice president of business development for the Arlington, Va., newspaper trade group. "I don't know that anyone views Google as the potential salvation of the newspaper industry."

Indeed, some view it as quite the opposite. Many in the publishing world grumble that Google and other aggregators are fleecing their pockets by keeping the lion's share of advertising revenue they generate compiling and linking to articles.

Google maintains that displaying headlines and story snippets is fair use and, moreover, drives enormous amounts of traffic to news sites.

"We don't believe at all that we undermine their efforts," said Chris Gaither, a spokesman for Google News. "We believe we help consumers find the news they're looking for and we provide tools for news publishers to help make more money on the traffic that they do get."

The latest initiatives reflect the company's belief that it can act as technology partner for the industry, helping it secure larger audiences and greater revenue online, he said.

Google Fast Flip went live yesterday (view it here). Fast Flip is Google's self proclaimed revolutionary news reading tool that allegedly combines the best of print and online creating a user interface which will alter the experience of reading, giving the viewer unlimited access to virtually all that is worth knowing. To me it is just sort of confusing. What is disappointing about this is that Google has been working on this since, I am pretty sure, 2003. That is a long time for something which appears to be pretty basic. 

There are some cool features: being able to scroll through multiple publications to review their coverage of similar news items is clever. Google is sharing revenue with the publications who participate based on the clicks that their pages generate, which is good. However, in return the publications had to give their content minus any of their own advertising, which is a big price to pay for participation in a revenue sharing deal.

Fast Flip is worth watching and once Google irons out some of the bugs, no doubt it will become a valuable tool for some people. But the launch of Fast Flip appears to be more about PR than revolution, a common theme among many of Google's new products.