It’s a gloomy morning for Google Labs users. On Wednesday, Google announced that the company would be discounting its beta testing Web site for new products.
Google made the announcement on the company’s blog shortly after noon on Wednesday, saying they were “prioritizing [their] product efforts.” The Atlantic’s Nicholas Jackson argues there are a number of “useless” Google Lab features, but that the Labs features that he uses, especially in GMail, pose a significant threat to his management of Google’s popular GMail service. After all, Labs has brought us Google Maps, Google alerts and Google Groups.
“We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed,” wrote Bill Coughran, senior vice president for research and systems infrastructure on Google’s official blog. As for which Labs features will be done away with, few of the details have been released. Wired reports that users of the GMail and Google Maps Lab products will not be affected.
After the announcement was made public, many users predictably took to Twitter to show their disappointment. You are welcome to tell us how you feel about the news in the comments below or drop us a line at