New from the GoogleLabs and blogged about like crazy already, but just in case you hadn’t heard, here’s my 2¢.

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

This new Google site features allowing you to see news stories in a series of columns, easily scrollable back and forth.  It’s a news story timeline, how cool!

Don’t you wish every newspaper & magazine database worked like this!?
Yes, yes, yes, it’s in beta and it’s not perfect, and it has limited sources (for now), and there are some other sites like this kinda already (See: newsmap), but you can see this thing has potential right away, you can see this has a future. But, don’t jsut take my word on it, here’s some other folks takes on it:

• Google News Timeline: A Glorious, Intriguing Time Sink / Edward N. Albro (PC World, Apr 20, 2009)
• Why did Google create News Timeline and not newspapers? / Kevin Anderson (PDA: The Digital Content Blog, The Guardian, 21 April 2009)

Maybe it’ll inspire library vendors to clean up their database interfaces, make them easier to use … hope so for them (and us), otherwise it’s bad for our database stastics as Google will have a lock on this audience.  With all the buzz I’m hearing and reading, in a week Google Timeline has already won the hearts of users and librarians for that matter.  When’s the last time a library newspaper/magazine database ever got this kind of media hype?