Labs. They pass many of us by but the internet giants all have them, the development websites where users can access innovative features and projects made by the company’s employees. Google has Google Labs where you can ‘explore new ideas’ whilst Facebook has Facebook Protoypes where you can test out their ‘experiments’. These sites are great for getting users to trial features. If they are a success, they might be integrated into the main product. If not, they may be removed.
Over at the alliteratively pleasing LinkedIn Labs, there is one feature that has been garnering a lot of attention. The InMaps analytics project uses the connections from your profile data to create a visual representation of the relationships in your professional network. It categorises the different sections into colours, enabling you to spot patterns and links between contacts, thus creating a useful tool and a very pretty picture! This is one lab feature that we hope is here to stay.
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