Google Labs: Play Around & Pitch in!
Ever experience those epiphanic moments when a big idea for an exciting, promising project comes to mind? Most likely, though, you’d want to go through a couple drafts, and run your idea by a few different people before dedicating all of your time to its full-blown creation. This is just the type of thing that Google engineers created Google Labs for.
If you haven’t explored Google Labs yet, it’s basically a place where more venturesome users can play with models of interesting ideas that haven’t yet made it to Google.com. More importantly, it’s a testing site for the Google engineers and researchers who came up with these ideas to get valuable feedback, in order to know how to improve their project to elevate it to Google.com quality … or to assess whether the idea is even worth the time. Though the style of commenting and rating on googlelabs.com is informal, the generated feedback, if wildly positive, can propel the best ideas to become part of the official Google family — Google Labs alumni include Google Alerts, Google Groups, Google Docs, and Google Maps.
Here are a few examples of some impressive current Google Lab experiments:
A document writer application that features text completion, correction, automatic link text, and fast formatting. Read an overview of the project, and try it out for yourself!
A browser extension that analyzes a website’s content to generate suggestions to speed up page load time. Take a look at some FAQs, and test out Page Speed Online on your website!
A customizable mapping service that suggests a walking tour which visits as many nearby points of interest as possible in the time available. Read the user-generated comments and suggestions, and embark on your own guided adventure with City Tours!
Become part of the conversation — don’t forget to comment on these experiments, and help separate the inspiring from the inadequate!
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