info:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-gmail-labs.html
http://lifehacker.com/395211/gmail-gets-13-experimental-new-features-tonight
http://www.ojobuscador.com/2008/06/06/gmail-labs/
We have a lot of ideas for Gmail -- many come as suggestions from Gmail users, many come from people here at Google. But there's only so much we can do at any one time.
People often ask how we decide what to build next. It's usually a mix of factors, like how many users are asking for it (think delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP, among others), how useful we think it will be (think chat, conversation view, etc.) or how much fun it will be to work on (this is actually really important). We have all sorts of debates about each option, we weigh the pros and cons, and then some of the time we probably make the wrong decision.
Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn't normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they're good or not. When you sign in, you'll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we'll eventually retire the ones that don't get much use. We've put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it.
One of the things that we like about working at Google is that it lets us have a big, positive influence and at the same time experiment rapidly, getting ideas to users very quickly. That combo of size and speed is something we care about a lot, and we've designed a culture and company that makes it possible.
The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break. (There's an escape hatch.)
The result of this loosely-directed chaos is 13 Labs features, with more on the way. Some of them we've found really useful, like Quick Links, which lets you save searches and any other views in Gmail. Kai and Julie wrote Superstars, which gives you different types of stars. Dave wrote Old Snakey, which lets you play an old school style computer game when you press "&". I'm just going to go out and say it: Old Snakey is probably a bad idea. But Dave wanted to do it, so Dave did it and anyone who uses Gmail can use it. And now you can help decide whether it's a good idea. That's the kind of thing that makes a project fun to work on.
(If you want to work on Gmail, too, we're hiring. But you need an Old Snakey score above 150.)
P.S. We are currently in the process of rolling Labs out to English users.
Starting at 6PM Pacific Time tonight, Google will start rolling out Gmail Labs, an experimental area of new Gmail features that will be familiar and very welcome to users of the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Once your Gmail account is Labs-enabled, you'll get a Labs tab in the Settings area of your account where you can enable 13 new experimental Gmail features, including signature tweaks, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and even a game. After the jump, get an exclusive sneak preview at the new Gmail Labs experimental features, with screenshots.
First, let's get right to the good stuff. Take a gander at the 13 new experimental features Gmail Labs adds:
Better Gmail and Better Gmail 2 users will be familiar (and hopefully very happy) with Fixed Font, Signature Tweaks, Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, and Hide Unread Counts. Google says it will start its user rollout in about an hour or so, which will continue over a span of the next few days or weeks. I've just gotten my account enabled here at the Google campus, so as I play with each feature, I'll add more screenshots to this post.
Update: Here are some more details and screenshots of the Gmail Labs features in action.
Superstars
Now you can flag, star, and otherwise mark messages using up to 12 different colored and shaped icons. When you enable Superstars, you get a new section in the General settings area, which looks like this.
Click on the star button on a message repeatedly to cycle through all the Superstar choices. Looks like Superstars is more a visual indicator than anything; you can't search by all the messages superstarred the check, for example.
Quick Links
Basically a souped-up version of the Gmail Saved Searches Greasemonkey user script, Quick Links adds a module to the Gmail sidebar where you can store links to searches, views, and even individual messages. Go to the view you want—like all messages that have PDF file attachments using the has:attachment PDF Gmail search—then click "Add Quick Link" to save what's essentially a Gmail view or message bookmark there. Email Addict
The Email Addict feature adds a "Take a Break" link to the top of your Gmail inbox, that looks like this:
When you click it, you get 14 minutes off from dealing with email:
Snakey
Ok people, Snakey is a straight-up time-waster, meant to give you something to do while you're procrastinating responding to email. The Snakey developer told me that he originally put it together for users to play while they waited for their inbox to load, but then thought it would be better to not make users wait at all—and give them the choice to play. As you can see from the screenshot, I suck (my high score is only 30 after 3 games!) and I hear that it's not easy to break 150 (but I'm sure you will try.)
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts
Just as you'd expect from the name, the custom keyboard shortcuts feature lets you map Gmail actions to the keys of your choice. While this isn't quite as cool as Gmail Macros, it's nice for folks who want to archive their messages via keyboard, but have something against the Y key (for example.) Click on the thumbnail on the right to pop up the full list of available key mappings and actions. Random Signature
Add a random quote to your email pulled from an RSS feed by enabling Random Signature. By default, Random Signature uses a feed from BrainyQuote.com, but you can set it to the feed of your choice in the signature settings.
The Gmail team announced the new Gmail Labs at a press event at the Googleplex today which I attended with several other tech bloggers and reporters. After the announcement, Keith Coleman (the Gmail product manager who we interviewed a few months back), took us on a tour of the Gmail "pod" or workspace. The best part? On a whiteboard where developers got to brainstorm feature ideas, they had taped a printout of Lifehacker readers' Gmail features wishlist. Not kidding. When I get home tonight, I will post photographic evidence.
You can read more about the press event with the Gmail team at the Googleplex today over at Techcrunch.
Update: Google's put up the Gmail Labs Help page, which links to the Gmail Labs Google Group.
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