Google just launched a pre-alpha “Fusion Tables”. The visualization capability is okay, the interface is not fully stable, but the cool thing is the ability to merge two tables, something I’ve spent a lot of time doing manually in the past, or with ad-hoc scripts.

Here’s an example where I merge their GDP table with a disease table. I need to pick the “WHO Regions/Country” in the right column, so that both tables get aligned:

Afterwards, I can do a scatter plot of GDP rank (X) with child mortality/1000 (Y):

So, high GDP makes child mortality less likely, but not always, and it’s not a correlation.

Even if Fusion tables is pre-alpha, the table fusion capability makes it immediately useful. The collaboration features look cool, but it will take some time to get them to work right. Then we’ll have proper horizontal collaboration.