Note: I originally wrote this here, but I got assigned the same topic at Betanews, so in my haste, I submitted this same blog post (although edited and re-tooled to omit four letter words and tone down a bit of the personal spin) to Betanews this morning. I hope you don’t feel cheated. I’ll do another one tonight.

Call me crazy, but aren’t Web apps just a kind of reversion back to the “Mobile Web” that was so furiously chastised when the full Web browsing experience came to smartphones?

I understand that our modern Web Apps are being rendered by a “desktop browser” engine, and not some junky WAP browser circa 2002, but I can’t help but feel that an application designed specifically for a mobile phone’s browser is the same goddamn thing as a Web site stripped down to Mobile Web size.

Google debuted the Fast Flip lab last night and it has thus far been received with moderate acclaim. The improved ad coverage and revenue sharing with publishers has been widely cited as a step forward. But what is Fast Flip and why would I give a single shit about it?

Well, it’s another news aggregator. It takes the top 30 headlining stories and arranges them as if you were reading a magazine with one story per page. You should care because a major aspect of this lab is the mobile component that allows Android and iPhone users to leaf through articles with a swipe of the finger. But really, that’s just about all there is to it.

Fast Flip Web App front page

There’s also a search field which lets you look for subjects of interest to you by keyword. One cool thing is that the search field has a built-in X button, so you can erase former searches or typos with a single button smash. That will come in pretty handy when trying to type in someone’s name and it autocompletes it as something else. My buddy from high school yesterday was trying to type in Swiss tennis player “Roger Federer” and it kept auto-correcting it to “Roger Desertes.”

I don’t know when “desertes” became something people really need to type either…but I blame them for Federer’s loss at the U.S. Open.

Once you’re in your chosen category, it’s pretty cool. You swipe your finger from right to left to flip to the next page overview. If the article looks interesting to you, you tap on it and an abstract pops up which asks if you want to view the full article, zoom in, or close the abstract.

abstract popup

You’re also given the option to “like” a story, adds a smiley face to the upper right hand corner and logs it into a profile for stories it will suggest later, sort of like when you give certain songs the thumbs up in Pandora and then you hear them 900 times a day. If you’re logged into your Gmail/Google account, you can also hit “email” and it’ll send a screenshot of the article to whatever email address you input.

Taking a hearty cue from Twitter, Fast Flip also has a trending topics category based on most commonly searched terms. Last night, there were some kinda fucked up ones in there, so I’m pulling it up right now and seeing what the trends are in Googleland.

Just as I expected…people are searching for Health Insurance, Bankruptcy, jobs, 9/11, cancer, abortion, Yankees, and Sarah Palin.

It’s all the depressing stuff the news is good for.

But the point here, albeit a rather blunt one, is that Web apps like Fast Flip, no matter how good, lack the hard key action of dedicated applications. All your controls are situated within the browser window, and if I hit “menu,” which is typically the master control switch for Android apps, I just get the browser’s controls, nothing specifically tailored to Google Fast Flip, or any Web App, for that matter.

Web Apps still feel like a hollow shell to me.