Google Labs News & Articles

It was a heavy week in G world this time around. We sniffled and waved a sad goodbye to Labs, welcomed a URL shortener, a virtual ton of Google+ visitors, new Webmaster features, and saw the first signs of Google letting up on the whole Oracle lawsuit 

Today was a sad day for the adventurous, as the great Google announced the closing of its Labs department -- birthing place of the likes of Reader and Public Data Explorer --  in an effort to focus more on its core products. 

Lurking in Google (news, site) Labs is a new feature that could simplify how search and social concepts coincide.

Google's (news, site) Analytics suite powers a lot of the Web's ad management, but for most has only been a reference dashboard. The new API will let devs get under the hood and create custom tools.

Yet another creature has crawled out of the muck that is the mad scientist home of Google Labs (news, site). This one's intent on helping you visualize and explore publicly-available data.

In December, Google’s Living Stories, one of the latest Google Labs endeavors, was used in collaboration with the WashingtonPost.com and New York Times to re-purpose content online. In February, Google is opening up Living Stories so that any publisher can adopt its experiment in presenting news online and in real time.

Google (news, site) is continuing to revitalize newspapers. They’ll be supplying the developer skills and partnering with The Washington Post and The New York Times to produce Living Stories.

Think fast! Google Fast Flip is here and it's sure to make things interesting for web publishers.

Fast Flip is one of the newest creations from Google Labs. It is a web application that combines the qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine.

With all the talk of new solutions, new technologies and new versions of technologies, it would be hard to imagine that a considerable number of companies are still having problems with the basics of digital asset management (DAM).

That would appear to be one of the primary conclusions of a new report released by the Aberdeen Group (news, site) for Widen, a provider of web-based digital asset management applications. The report says that only half of Best-in-Class organizations (53%) indicated they currently have searchable access to content.

Google has launched Google Apps Labs, an experimental area that will enable Google Apps for Your Domain customers to place add-ons into popular Google hosted applications. These third-party applications will need to be added by the domain administrator of a Google Apps-enabled domain.

Google has thrown out 3 Labs add-ons as a demonstration of the type of functionality available from using Apps Labs including: Google Code Reviews, which will enable software developers to collaborate on code; Google Short Links, which makes it possible to shorten URLs; and Google Moderator, an app that allows you groups to have an online home for a question and answer portal.

It remains to be seen how popular it will be to create third-party add-ons for Google Apps, but it is refreshing to see Google open up and allow for the possibilities to be manifested.