“Today we’re introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.”

Neat … I think.
Certainly useful from mashup component perspective.
Certainly a dev tool.
I’m struggling with the cell-wise discussion. Seems useful from a personal productivity spreadsheet perspective, but wouldn’t most ‘joined’ datasets be higher volume that would make this useful? Or am I misjudging the ‘state of the art’ in mashup components?

Is this throwing a technology at the wall to see what sticks?