14 DAY TRIAL // Google announced that it will be shutting down Labs, its one-site-fits-all project which was home to anything that didn't fit easily anywhere else or was just too wacky. But as Google is focusing on fewer projects it's been looking at things to kill and Google Labs is a great target.
Still, not all Labs experiments are getting the axe, some are spared, though most don't seem to be that lucky. Google hasn't yet decided on all experiments, but it has announced the fate of some.
Google Scribe for example, an editor that can predict and auto-complete words, Google Instant-style, gets to carry on and will be integrated into the Blogger editor.
Already, it can be accessed from Blogger in Draft, Blogger's version of Google Labs.
Another project that will live to see another day is Google Books Ngram Viewer, which has been graduated from Google Labs. The tool uses the vast collection of books Google has scanned to look at how popular certain works have been through the ages.
It can be a great tool for research, helping to uncover interesting and unintuitive trends, but it can be great fun as well. It will now be part of Google Books.
Finally, another project that will be saved for certain is Google Swiffy, a SWF to HTML5 converted, that has gotten some attention. Google says that the project is still very much alive and being worked up and will be moved elsewhere soon.
However, Google will kill off all of these experiments:
Image Swirl - a visual search tool for related images; Sputnik - a JavaScript compatibility testing tool; Google Talk Guru - a Google Talk bot which can provide answers for you; App Inventor for Android - a simple Android app creator; Google Breadcrumb - a mobile app developer tool; Script Converter - a transliteration tool.
Finally, here are some of the best known and popular Google Labs experiments on which Google may not have decided yet:
Google Goggles - a powerful computer vision search tool for mobile devices; Aardvark - a Q&A service it acquired; Chrome Experiments - a collection of demos showcasing the modern web; Google Squared - a structured data search engine; Google Moderator - a tool for managing feedback from thousands of users; Flu Trends - a tool for tracking flu spread based on search terms; Google Correlate - a tool for matching search trends to any other data trend; Page Speed Online - a tool for optimizing page load speed; Google Body - a WebGL showcase.