Google integrated two of its news experiments, Fast Flip and Living Stories, into the US homepage of Google News today.
Living Stories, a project developed with the New York Times and the Washington Post, is on the upper right next to Top Stories, while Fast Flip (picture above) is right down at the bottom of the page. Both experiments should now see their audiences widen considerably.
"Encouraged by the positive feedback we've received from users and partners, we decided to expose the service to more potential readers by integrating it with the US English version of Google News," software engineers Jack Hebert, Matthew Watson and Corrie Scalisi wrote about Fast Flip on the Google news blog.
Fast Flip is Google's visual approach to news aggregation and was introduced in September. It features about 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, newswires and TV and radio broadcasters from the US and the UK.
"Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites."
Meanwhile, it has become apparent that new Associated Press stories are no longer appearing on the site, which has hosted them since 2007. Google hasn't added new AP content since December 24.
Asked for the reason, Google was somewhat evasive: "We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we're not adding new hosted content from the AP."
Google hosted material produced by the AP along with other news agencies directly on Google News for 30 days from August 2007, but the agreement is set to expire at the end of January.
As AP and Google are in the process of renegotiating their licensing agreement, paidContent suggests this might be not be a good sign on the progress of the talks.
The search engine has ongoing licensing agreements with the Canadian Press, Agence France Presse and the UK's Press Association, as well as with several members of the European Pressphoto Agency.
