• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

Do you often find time to experiment with the projects that are cooking in Google labs? I don’t very often, but I stumbled across it the other day and got caught up in testing out some of the experimental apps. There are quite a few of them, but here are six of them that are really worth trying out.

Follow Finder

Follow Finder analyzes public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow and generates two lists based on the public social connections on Twitter:

• Tweeps you might like: FF starts with the list of people you follow, finds others with similar lists, and then identify accounts you might also want to follow. If people with similar lists tend to follow accounts that aren’t in your list, FF will recommend those additional accounts to you. For example, if you follow BBC and The Guardian on Twitter, and most people who follow BBC and The Guardian also tend to follow TIME, FF will suggest TIME as a user to follow.

• Tweeps with similar followers: FF finds people with similar public lists of followers to yours. For example, if ten people are following you, and the same ten people are following a second user, FF will include the second user in this list. You may already be following some of these people.

Sputnik

Sputnik is a JavaScript conformance test suite containing over 5000 tests. It tests how well a JavaScript implementation adheres to the ECMA-262 specification version 5, looking only at those features that were also present in the previous version, version 3, and not the new features added in version 5.

The Sputnik site allows you to run the sputnik tests and to compare the most popular browsers’ test results. On the run page you can run the full test suite in your browser and browse the failing tests. The compare page shows an experimental plot illustrating how popular browsers perform compared to each other. The distance to the centre shows how close the browser is to passing all tests; the further the browser is from the centre the more tests it fails. The distance between browsers shows how different they are; the more similar two browsers are – the more test failures they have in common – the closer they will be.

Gesture Search

Do you find it hard to find a contact or locate an application from a list of hundreds of items on an Android phone? Or do you find it stressful to search for an item by typing in its title while on the go?

Gesture Search from Google Labs lets you search your Android-powered device by drawing alphabet gestures on the touch screen. It allows you to quickly find a contact, a bookmark, an application, or a music track from hundreds or thousands of items, all in one place. It is fast and fun to use.

Gesture Search currently recognizes the English alphabet and requires Android 1.6 or above.

Public Data Explorer

The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don’t have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you’re always sharing the latest available data.

Google Shopper

Find product information quickly with your Android phone. Find prices, reviews, specs, and more. Google Shopper is powered by Google Product Search. Scan the barcode of almost any product to quickly learn more about it. Find a product by simply pointing your camera phone at the cover art of a book, CD, DVD, or video game. Say the name of a product and find it easily in Shopper.

Google Shoppersaves your history and lets you star your favorites for later. Find something you want to share? Click on the share link to post to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messaging, etc.

Google Reader Play

Google Reader Play is a fun, fast way to browse the most interesting items on the web, personalized just for you.

Google Reader Play will keep track of the things you star, like, or share, and show you more stuff you’ll like the next time you use Reader Play.

Star things to mark them for later.

Like things to show the world what you enjoy.

Share things with your friends and followers.