To be frank, it was an incoherent, unsatisfying, poorly supported tangle of perpetual alpha and beta technologies. Google would likely prefer it be seen as a relic of the Pre-Plus Era, back when Google "didn't get social software." The whole company is remaking itself now, with a very well received social network as the common thread now running through all the company's sprawling properties around the web. Google Plus wasn't a Labs Beta, it was a company-wide "field test" developed in deep secrecy and then shared with 10 million people who couldn't get enough of it.

"In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments--in others we'll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market."

Reactions among Google Labs app users range from concern that the news signals an end to a period of experimentation at Google to hopefulness that existing products will be better-supported as a result.

There was a sort of a flow with Labs, though. Ideas would be launched there, the company would see what kind of uptake they got, sometimes they would "graduate" from labs and sometimes they would be ended instead. Most of the time they would just hang out there forever, being just ok. What the new flow for experiments to be productized will be is something to watch for. A Google spokesperson said in an email, "there won't be any immediate changes to in-product experimentation channels like Gmail Labs or Maps Labs. We'll continue to experiment with new features in each of our products."

When exactly Google Labs was born is unclear (I couldn't figure it out, anyway) but it appears to have been at least 7 years ago. Labs for Google Apps, the company's hosted enterprise software arm, was announced just under 3 years ago. Google Plus is not yet available for Apps users.

The market's perception of Google's relationship with innovation and experimentation now awaits all the more the release of Google Plus developer tools.

When you enter a data set into Correlate, it uses the Pearson Correlation Coefficient - a principle of statistics regarding data sets - to show the highest related coefficient within the search term. Correlate data can be input from either a spreadsheet or by exporting a CSV. Correlate also has pre-existing data sets from locations like states.

Google is trying to position itself as a leader in big data and Correlate is one of the first tools it has launched to gain added value from data sets. Sean Power co-author of Complete Web Monitoring (O"Reilly 2009) weighed in on what Correlate will mean going forward.

"Correlate, We're going to see this type of announcements and many more coming from Google in the upcoming quarters," Power said. "Just like Amazon wants to own the infrastructure stack of the world to feed intelligence into their business, Google must own the Analytics stack to augment their own core. With major updates to Trends and Analytics, and unsung tools like BigQuery, Google is poised to be a major player in the data space."

Think of Correlate as an inverse of a normal search. Say you are searching Google Trends for "mittens" (that is the example that Google uses in the Correlate tutorial). You would input "mittens" and feed it through a defined time set, a couple of years for instance. Correlate would be the opposite. You enter the data set for a time series and Correlate will extract information through the algorithm and tie the relationship to Google search results. It is not a matter of searching a data set but finding the relationships of that data set and time series to a larger search quotient.

Correlate can do positive as well as negative correlations over data sets. It can be a tool to create data models or find key trends in a location over a period of time. Correlate filters queries with low correlation values, misspelled words, pornographic searches, rare queries and those within a small portion of a time series.

In terms of privacy, you may be hesitant to hand Google a big chunk of data that is necessary to use Correlate as an effective tool. Google relies on its millions of search queries to observe patterns across a large population. Google says "we are keenly aware of the trust our users place in us, and of our responsibility to protect their privacy. Google Correlate can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."

As Shared Spaces uses Wave technology, there are already 50 different gadgets available, including shared maps, scheduling tools, polls, Sudoku games, and drawing boards.

So, will more folks adopt Wave in this format?

According to the description on the Google Labs site, Javascript developers will be able to build their own gadgets in order to build more Shared Spaces tools. However, the link to Shared Spaces via the Google's Labs page returns an error message, so perhaps Shared Spaces - (oh dear) much like Wave - isn't quite ready for prime time.

(Here's the direct link to Shared Spaces.)

Called the Books Ngram Viewer, the tool offers a fascinating look at the way that language, literature and culture have changed throughout recent history. I've been typing in all kinds of fun searches and have included screenshots of 10 of my favorites below. What do all these changes mean? It's probably fodder for endless after dinner conversation and drinking games. Some of them are surprising and some are not at all. We would love it if you would share your thoughts and links to your favorite Ngram search results with other ReadWriteWeb readers in comments below. Thanks, Google, for providing this great example of the beauty made possible through indexing large sets of data.

Changing media types. Hello, radio in WWII era books! And look at the tiny little Internet, just starting to get in the game, there in the right hand corner.

Seven deadly sins. Looks like we're growing less fixated and finding other things to write about.

Angels vs. Unicorns vs. Mermaids. Not even close.

Garlic vs. Onion. We are living in changing times, people.

Carrot vs. Celery Celery probably thought it was pulling into the lead for good. Not so!

Major religions of the world. Indexed literature is growing increasingly diverse.

Drugs

Phobias and prejudices. Is this a chart of what the world cares about most?

Nerds, Dorks, Geeks and More

Authors: Huxley vs Camus vs Leary vs McLuhan Honestly, I think this one is the one that surprised me the most. If not carrot vs celery.

Want to see more? There's a whole community of Ngram collection going on over at Ngrams.Tumblr.com.

The most obvious application for Google Scribe is as a keystroke saver for Google's mobile platform, Android, and as an Internet-wide form of Google Suggest, the tool that suggests search terms as you type. In the meantime, it will likely offer up some entertainment and a bit of procrastination.

Another user noted in the reviews on Google Labs that they had found a similar phenomenon, wherein "If you let it autocomplete everything but the first word it ends up looping on itself, but not before running into 'Ima let you finish but Beyonce had one of the best...'".

Google-centric blog Google Operating System noted similar instances, which it explains comes from Google using "data extracted from web pages". It offers the example of "choose IngentaConnect" as a suggestion for after typing the word "why", which is offered because that phrase is used repeatedly on IngentaConnect's site.

For now, the tool is only available in English, though the presence of a language drop-down box strongly suggests others will soon be available. Users can also chose between constant word and phrase suggestions or having suggestions appear only when they hit the "tab" key.

A bookmarklet is also available, which shows which text fields on any page will allow Scribe to provide suggestions, meaning suggestions similar to those you would get in Google Search can now be offered up across the Web. In terms of functionality off the mobile platform, this might be the biggest - the power of Google Suggest anywhere you like. Perhaps this will be a feature we soon see added to Google Chrome? We'll see.

The real advantage, we think, will be to Google's mobile users, who don't have access to a full keyboard, but rather a touch screen. It could also be a big hit on Google TV, which will allow users to use their Android phones as controls.

According to the company's blog, the new feature will be able to read five different, Latin-based languages and translate to many more, all using a smartphone's camera.

Using Google Goggles for this feature is a simple process, as described on Google's blog:

• Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
• Press the shutter button
• If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
• Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

Google has announced several advancements involving translation over recent months, including automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and even software it is developing to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Each of these technologies involves technologies which will help in creating a cohesive augmented reality experience in the future, translating the world we hear and see around us into data, which can then be worked with in other ways. And even at the core, test translation is not perfect, so Google is dealing with an immense problem. As it writes in its blog, "computer vision is a hard problem. [...] The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search."

Google Goggles version 1.1 is currently only available for devices running Android 1.6 and higher and is available from the Android Marketplace.

Limited to the Internet Explorer 6 web browser, for now, Google Toolbar Labs debuts with two toolbar variations with different goals. One toolbar includes enhanced location detection and the other optimizes the toolbar for the Chinese character set.

• Google Toolbar with My Location: This toolbar includes an advanced feature that can determine the general area the computer is in by IP address. It then uses this information in its enhanced Google search by area feature. If you are using a laptop with Internet Explorer already, this feature can come in handy by letting you quickly search the local area for the resource you need, even if you don't know exactly where you are.
• Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar: This toolbar is pretty clearly geared toward Chinese IE users. It features a space-optimized layout better suited to the Chinese language and features a new sidebar mode for managing bookmarks. It also has built-in buttons for translating foreign-language web pages in to Chinese.

Google Labs promises that these are just the beginning for this new offshoot of their now widespread domain of Google properties. We hope so, because honestly we don't spend a whole lot of time in Internet Explorer any more, and it would be interesting to see if a new killer app toolbar came out for a different browser like Firefox.

Google added a number of interesting features to Google Image search lately, including the ability to filter pictures by style and color. Now, this new Google Labs project can also find similar images. In our tests, this worked quite well and this new feature should make it easier to find just the right image. Though, for now, it seems like only a select number of images feature the "similar images" link.

Google News Timeline

The more interesting new project, however, is News Timeline. Google Labs already featured the ability to add timelines to your search results and Google News features some basic functions for restricting results to certain dates, but the News Timeline, as the name implies, focuses on news stories and represents a major step forward for this feature.

Users can choose to display the most important stories about a topic by day, month, year, or decade. Most importantly, it is also easy to restrict searches by the type of source, including blogs, newspapers, news photos, and Wikipedia, or the type of content, including music and artwork. Interestingly, some of our searches for blogs also included a number of results from public twitter profiles.

The new News Timeline also features relevant photos and YouTube videos, which play right in the timeline interface. Interestingly, you can also choose from a number of features, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, though the selection here is currently limited to only two newspapers and a handful of magazines and blogs. The timeline will also include media files from Freebase.

A New Look and Home for Google Labs

Google Labs now features a new interface and it also finally has its own domain at Googlelabs.com and an RSS feed. Google has clearly taken to the 'labs' idea and after using it for Gmail and Google Code, it seems like it is ready to roll it out to a broader audience.

"Tapping into the "Lost Boys" market - hard-to-target 18- to 34-year-old males - was the key to the company's success, Batten said.

"We told advertisers: 'We've found the Lost Boys. They're playing games and we can get you in front of them'."

Speaking to the Herald on Sunday from Seattle, Batten was coy about how much she got from the sale, reported at between US$200-400 million ($643m). "It's all under wraps. I'm really pleased with the outcome, it's better left at that," she laughed."

Thanks Dave ten Have for the tip. There's a lot of software talent in Wellington - TradeMe (NZ's eBay) got bought for nearly half a billion US dollars in March and AfterMail went for US$45M in January. Must be something in the water here :-)

Compare this to Alexa's breakdown:

- google.com - 75%
- mail.google.com - 8%
- images.google.com - 8%
- groups.google.com - 2%
- video.google.com - 2%
- news.google.com - 1%
- froogle.google.com - 1%
- Other websites - 3%

Pretty close and shows really that Google has a lot of work to do in its 'verticals'.

"Garage Philosophy
- Solve a Pain Point
- Have Passion for the Idea
- Be Cheap!!
- Release Early/Release Often (3 Month Rule) - Doesn't Have to be Perfect
- Involve Your Users"

I wonder what Fletcher will build next, he seems to have a nose for what will be the Next Big Thing on the Web...