The previously rumored Google news site “Flipper” is in fact launching today as “Fast Flip” in Google Labs. But maybe it should be called Google Skimmer because it permits people to move very quickly through lots of visually rich news pages from dozens of partner publications. According to the Google Blog Post:

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, 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 are some screenshots provided by Google, which look quite similar to the originally leaked screens from the earlier “Flipper” rumors:

According to Google’s Marissa Mayer, Google co-founder Larry Page said, “Why isn’t the web like a magazine?” and wanted a way to browse it. Well, Fast Flip lets users visually browse (as well as search) news. There’s also personalization; the site makes recommendations based on your clicks, searches and other behavior.

When you click on any of the stories, you’re taken to publisher sites, which makes them happy. Speaking of which, Google’s initial publisher partners include the NY Times, Atlantic Magazine, Washington Post, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek.

Google is banking that an improved user experience will mean lots of traffic and page views. Google says that revenue generated from ads on the site will be split with publishers. (This could potentially be a goldmine of display inventory for Google if it expands the content from news into a broad range of magazines.)

If it’s a hit, this probably becomes the successor to Google News. And it may be the testing ground for the potential “micropayments platform” that Google is developing for content publishers — it’s all coming together now. I’m only partly kidding with that remark.

We haven’t yet had a chance to try the site but it looks like a much richer and more interesting way to consume news than, well, Google News.

Google says there’s also a mobile version “with tactile page flipping,” for the iPhone and Android.

Although I don’t personally use it I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Cashback. That sounds like a contradiction I know. But I thought it was a very clever consumer-advertiser proposition when it launched in May of last year.

It gives advertisers a way to stand out in search results* (and only pay if there’s a sale) and offers consumers money back or rebates on their product purchases. On paper there was a kind of alignment of interests and it didn’t seem simply like a bribe to users.

Shortly after it launched there was a bump in traffic but it has failed to contribute in any meaningful way to the growth of Microsoft Search. The company later launched SearchPerks, which offered a broader use case, providing prizes to use Microsoft Search. Now comes another response to the usage problem: Cashback toolbar integration. If the user won’t come to Live Search for Cashback, Cashback will come to users — at least their toolbars.

I’m on a Mac now and so I couldn’t install and see how it worked. However, according to the Live Search blog:

The MSN Toolbar (http://toolbar.msn.com) contains a cashback–offer-detecting mechanism. This means that wherever you search online — whether it’s Yahoo, Live, Google or Craigslist — the toolbar will gleam an icon if there is cashback available for the item you searched for.

It never fails, and when you click the gleam it brings you to the page where the cashback offer is available.

One might infer from associating this with the “MSN toolbar” that the demise of the “Live” brand is all but certain. It’s not clear to me whether this becomes part of Microsoft’s several “default search,” pre-loaded toolbar deals with partners Dell, HP and Lenovo.

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*As an anecdotal aside, I was told today by a large search marketer that the presence of the Google Checkout icon — Cashback also features a coin icon — had provided an 8% CTR improvement vs. ads without it.

This year is the 200th anniversary of naturalist Charles Darwin’s birth. I bring that up because Google’s approach to product decision-making has always struck me as “Darwinian.”

The company introduces new products and services, generally without much promotion, and then it’s a version of survivor or “survival of the fittest.” Another appropriate metaphor here is the “free market.”

If Google’s products don’t gain traction they may disappear back into the Google “engeneering” pool or form the basis for new species, as with the recent shuttering of Dodgeball and opening of Latitude. The company seems to rarely get involved, deus ex machina style, to market its new products or otherwise boost their profile among users, with a few exceptions. But Google used to give its products lots of time to develop an audience or fail. That cycle is now compressing, it would appear, in the recession.

Virtual world Lively is probably the shortest-lived project in Google history: about five months from public debut to death. That story, as well as discussion of the rationale behind why Google “pulls the plug” on products, appeared in an article over the weekend from the NY Times. As an aside, Bradley Horowitz, former Head of Advanced Products for Yahoo, makes one of his first “public appearances” as a Google employee in the piece:

“We didn’t see that passionate hockey-stick growth in the user base,” said Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president for product management. Management decided that the half-dozen people working on Lively could be more productive elsewhere.

The product development culture at Google is lauded in the article as rewarding risk taking. Google’s Marissa Mayer has also discussed in the past Google’s willingness to try things and put out imperfect products, both to gauge audience interest and reaction and to help more rapidly develop the products themselves. She’s referred to it as “iterative product development.”

This “iterative” or “risk-taking” strategy has paid off well for Google. But Google’s reluctance to market or otherwise promote its products has caused some that could have been much more successful to fall short of their potential. Two examples that come to mind are Google Checkout and GOOG-411.

In fact, in a departure, Google did limited, early advertising for GOOG-411, its free directory assistance substitute with some outdoor ads in a few markets. In consumer surveys I’ve been involved with, however, there’s very limited awareness and usage of GOOG-411 (that’s even more true of competing products such as Microsoft’s 1-800-Call-411). That may be just fine for Google, which has used the service for a range of internal purposes, such as training speech recognizers for its mobile voice search offering. It may also be that the growth Google is seeing in usage is enough to justify the continued existence of the service.

I believe, however, a bit more traditional awareness building would dramatically boost adoption of GOOG-411 and that it could even become an effective advertising vehicle later — a place to put some of those audio ads now that Radio Ads is going away.

Checkout is another curious example of what I’m describing. The payments system was launched in Q2 2006 amid widespread discussion of whether it was a “PayPal killer.” Two and a half years later that could hardly be less true.

More than most new Google products, Checkout received a number of indirect and low-key efforts at promotion. It was featured, of course, on the Google home page and in B2B online ads a number of times. There were also several modest attempts at consumer promotion.

Yet, when it launched, Checkout was treated by Google as a strategic offering. But the company largely failed to explain the product to consumers and make the case for why they should use it. There were some very powerful consumer features in Checkout that Google just never got across effectively. I wrote at the time Checkout launched:

The key for Google is to establish trust and build consumer acceptance and adoption right out of the gate. I think the entire system hinges directly on this. And part of that will be marketing and promotion of the system — something that Google has been loathe to do with any sustained focus for any of its recently introduced products.

Now Google is compelling consumers to use Checkout to buy paid apps in the Android mobile market. Who knows? This may finally give the service the boost it really never got from Google initially.

People have been expecting the paid Android apps market for months and it’s finally, officially here. What this means is that developers can start charging for their apps and consumers will start gaining access to and paying for selected apps on Android phones (which now is only the G1).

The Apple iPhone paid apps market has been very successful, with games leading the way among paid apps. Most of the top paid apps in the iTunes store run either $.99 or $1.99.

Apple takes a cut of every transaction, whereas Android/Google will not.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement of the introduction of paid apps for Android was this:

Google Checkout will serve as the payment and billing mechanism for Android Market. Developers who do not already have a Google Checkout merchant account can easily sign up for one via the publisher website.

In other words both sides (developers and consumers) will need to use Checkout to participate. While this makes sense for Google — it’s a payment infrastructure that Google already developed — it’s another way to promote (or compel) Checkout adoption. By all accounts Checkout has had very limited penetration among consumers.

Mobile payments is another area ripe for development. PayPal has mobile payments and has been working on this area for quite some time. However, as Android phones proliferate Checkout may also prosper and Google may have its foot in the door of another emerging “industry.”

Google has added claims to its Google Checkout Merchant homepage that having Google Checkout as part of your AdWords ads will lead to higher conversions and a better click through rate. Google specifically writes that conversions will increase by 40% and the click-through-rate on your ads will increase by 10%.

Here is a screen capture from the page:

I spotted this via Google Blogoscoped, which has also documented the various Google checkout badges Google has used throughout the years. As you can see, having the Google Checkout badge makes the ad stand out from the other ads. So I am not surprised by the 10% claim. The 40% claim does seem a bit high, but who knows how they came to those numbers.

Google first changed to a larger badge set about two years ago and then added a more colorful option in August.

Postscript: Google has sent Google Blogoscoped a statement on these claims. Let me share it with you because it makes a big difference:

Google isn’t actually saying that there is 10% gain in CTR. It’s saying there is a 10% gain in CTR for “Google Checkout users”.

Steve LaLonde spotted Google sporting new checkout badges for some Google Checkout merchants within the AdWords listings. I was able to reproduce it for a search on petco, a Google Checkout merchant.

Here is a side by side look at the checkout badges on AdWords. The $5 off version is the new version being tested, the other one is the normal checkout badge:

Google has a large FAQ on badges, but this $5 off badge is new. Steve asked Google about the new badges and received this response:

As part of this experiment, a percentage of search results on google.com will display the promotional badge. We’ve done experiments with our badges in the past and we’re committed to constant refinement and experimentation in the future. We have no further details to share at this time.

It seems to me that the “percentage of search results” that trigger this are based on the merchant and not on the searcher, but I can be wrong.

The Google Checkout blog announced that they have launched Google Checkout Trends. Google Checkout Trends is a flavor of Google Trends, but limits the data to that collected from Google Checkout merchants.

It basically shows you what people are buying and selling online via Google Checkout. You can plug in one keyword or several keywords separated by comma, and it will show you a chart plotting revenue over time.

At the time I am writing this, Google Checkout Trends is currently not working. I am sure Google is working on fixing it. In the meantime, if you want to see some examples of charts, go over to Google Blogoscoped, which has an example of how many Google Apps were sold over time.

Google has trends for several of their applications, such as Google Trends for the main search index. They also came out with Google Hot Trends in May and Google Reader Personalized Trends about a year ago. Google Finance charts are basically a form of Google Trends, but with stock data. Google News has a form of trends for archive news, as well.

The Google Checkout Blog announced that Google Checkout for Non-Profits users will now get the Google Checkout icon on their Google AdWords campaign.

The Google checkout icon adds more visibility to your AdWords ads. In this case, it should help non-profits earn more money and also save with zero transaction fees through Google Checkout.

Here is an example of the icon in action:

Google first launched these badges in January 2007 and changed the way they looked in February.

Friday, a Google patent application filing named Text message payment was posted at the US Patent & Trademark Office site. The patent described how “GPay” can be used to make payment via text messages.

An example of how Gpay can be used includes mostly offline scenarios such as paying for items in vending machines or paying simple offline retailers.

Here is an image from the patent that shows a method of paying over your phone:

There is a lot of coverage on this new patent application, along with a lot of speculating as to what it might mean to the future of paying for offline items. Other coverage can be found at SEO By The Sea, TechCrunch, SEOptimise, Into Mobile and Techmeme.

Philipp Lenssen reported that Google is now using the Google Promotion label within Google Product Search results, for a promotion of the Google Checkout service above listings.

Ionut Alex. Chitu saw this for a product search on watch and sent Philipp a screen capture. I don’t see the promotion box coming up myself, though Danny does. This is the second sighting of a box labeled “promotion” in Google results.

What is this Google Promotion label? Earlier this month we found Google promoting The Bourne Ultimatum without labeling the ad as a sponsored listing or with any disclaimer. Google then responded by adding the new “Google Promotion” label.

New Google Checkout Promo; New Google Trust Worries and Google Checkout Blogs On Recent Promotions provide more information about concerns that have been raised about Google Checkout being promoted without any disclaimer. Now Google seems to be using the new Google Promotions label as a way to ease some of those concerns.

Perhaps it will also spread for other types of promotions Google does. Fury Over Google’s Self Promotion & Wishing For Perspective covers how earlier this year, Google “tips” pitching Google’s Blogger came under fire as for being seen as unlabeled ads.