http://tables.googlelabs.com/public/tour/tour1.html

Import and visualize table data online

is this the new gapminder?

I don't understand how useful it is.
It's nothing other than Google docs (spreadsheets) with bigger capacity, at first sight.

Did you notice the new domain name: googlelabs.com (well new to me at least, maybe old but this was the first time I noticed it).

> Did you notice the new domain name: googlelabs.com

Google Labs was moved there in April when Similar Images and Google News Timeline were launched:

<< Google Labs reloaded

[...] In order to keep up with our engineers, we decided it was time to remodel Google Labs to make room for more — you guessed it — innovation! We started with the foundation: we rebuilt the service from scratch using Google App Engine, and we moved it to a new home at www.googlelabs.com. >>

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/hard-at-play-in-google-labs-with.html

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

Google Fusion – is at first view – an enhanced type of List View for (much) larger tables than are possible in Google Docs spreadsheets (typically 10 ... 100 times larger; assuming cells filled with 50 to 5 Bytes of data).

Additionally the Google Fusion tables allow a bit more advanced filtering (not great but you can use awful great number of simple conditions (=, >, <, >=, <= ; but no wildcards) and you can merge tables into larger tables – although a simple test with some available test spreadsheets did not reveal the kind of JOIN this would produce (The fact you can't easily view multiple tables made this extra hard).

This makes Google Fusion 'databasy' with a proprietary interface to manipulate the data and the tables.

It would be great if Google Fusion tables could be used to store huge amounts of data but that Google Spreadsheets would provide a 'smart' function – a combination of ImportRange and FILTER – to 'query' these tables.

As it is now Google Fusion is a bit clunky and lacking a state of the art interface. If only Google would allow the user to employ some standard interface methods like SQL or QBE *) (although you can use the filters to get a comparable result).

  

*) QBE: Query By Example
see e.g. http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid41_gci214554,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example

So....
Google Spreadsheets: a useful if incomplete alternative to MS Excel
Fusion Tables: a fast, very incomplete and awkward answer to MS Access

Honestly, unless they discuss their future PLANS for this product, I see nothing much interesting here except "lots of data storage" and "give data to Google to make teh internet moar better-er-er".

Also, a clever company could combine spreadsheets and databases if they could invent a good enough UI to expose both sets of functionality. There is so much overlap between a good spreadsheet and a good database from a USER'S perspective that this could happen. For example, any spreadsheet created or uploaded that is strictly structured could be stored as a fusion table by default, with constraints. Then spreadsheet mode could be invoked to generate pretty reports from parts of it.

ahab
You are absolutely correct. No query language, no deal.

http://video.ted.com/talks/embed/TimBerners-Lee_2009-embed_high.flv

look like google is a bit "scared" of wolfram|alpha ...