Google has announced that it is “winding down” Labs, its system of introducing new features as experimental prototypes. While I don’t imagine that means the end of innovation from Google, it does mark an unfortunate change in the way we get to experience those innovations.
Google Maps on your phone is a great way to navigate in unfamiliar areas, but what happens if there’s no signal? A new Google Maps Lab feature lets you download maps within 10 miles (how very imperial) of any location listed on a place page, ensuring you have basic details even when your phone can’t connect.
It used to be that with Chrome, you could only enable experimental features (like moving tabs to the side) by manually adding flags to the shortcut. Now, dev build users can enable them from the new about:labs page.
Sending someone a Google Maps URL can be a pain, because they tend to be very long. To remedy this, Google has integrated their previously mentioned goo.gl URL shortening service into Google Maps, so you can shorten links right from the map.
newVideoPlayer( {"type":"video","player":"http://www.youtube.com/v/pXh6sRRWbrw&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22","customParams":[] ,"width":570,"height":412,"ratio":0.824,"flashData":"","embedName":null,"objectId":null,"noEmbed":false,"source":"youtube"} );
Thanks to some handy tricks in the Google Labs bag you can easily add an HTML signature complete with images and save it for future use without plugins or outside help.
Besides a killer algorithm and brand-name recognition, Google’s greatest strength is its speed at releasing new products. We get to play with new, cool and ever-improving tools for free. Recently, though, we’ve seen that being unwitting lab subjects can kind of stink.
Google Labs today released Google Squared, which, according to the search giant, “constructs a table of facts about any search category you specify”—though some searches produce distinctly better results than others.
Well, that was quick. Google has killed off Lively, the 3D avatar environment it launched with some fanfare back in June. The service will be switched off by the end of the year, a post on Google’s blog confirmed. It’s useful proof that even the Google branding can’t make a 3-legged dog — which is how most 3D online environments still come across — an attractive proposition.
