Most services offered by Google are stuck-up in labs, even after months or years of being functional. Google Labs is actually a showcase of ideas which are not yet ready for prime time. Google prefers telling that a service is “labs” instead of telling that it’s in “beta” (Gmail is an exception here). Occasionally, we’ve seen some service come out of labs, but it’s a very rare thing to happen. Surprisingly, Google put two new services out of Google Labs: Google Reader and GOOG-411.
Google Reader Team posted on their blog that they are breaking up with labs. You can no longer see the labs label in their logo. They’ve also made Google Reader multilingual. Prior to this, Google Reader was only available in English, but now they support French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, English (UK), Japanese, and Korean.
Another service to graduate from Google Labs is GOOG-411. It is a toll-free number, which can be used to search local business for free. Previously, the service was called GOOG-411 Experimental, but now they’ve shortened it to just GOOG-411.
Google Labs lists 16 projects which are yet to be graduated. I expect Google Trends and Google Page Creator to be next!
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