Google recently launched a new, more visual format for viewing news and articles online. The service, called “Fast Flip”, has a magazine-style menu, showing screen shots of articles as they are published online. Using Fast Flip, you can sort articles based on their topics, source, section, their popularity on Google and even most controversial. At the top of the Fast Flip page, there is also a search bar so you can type in a term and generate a page with news related to that topic. You can find fast flip at fastflip.googlelabs.com/.

Once you click an article to view the screen shot, you have a number of options. You can go to the original article to read the full text; you can follow links to read more articles from the particular source, author or category; you can share the article via e-mail, Facebook , Twitter and other social networks; or you can continue to the next article in your custom magazine. You can also “like” an article so Google will be able to further customize your Fast Flip experience. Once you have liked enough articles, there will be an option to see recommendations.

This custom electronic magazine style is a growing trend for news consumption. Flipboard is an app for the iPad which will display your Twitter and Facebook feeds so they look similar to pages in a magazine. If this trend continues, we could see further evolution of the ways to receive news.

How do you prefer to obtain your news custom magazine-style, clicking on headlines or physically reading a newspaper?