Gmail Gets Its Own Labs

I guess that many of you are familiar with Google Labs, the website where the search giant offers demos of its projects that aren’t ready for prime time. Google Labs serves also as a testing grounds and a a way for the company to gather feedbacks form the users.

Starting today, Google decided that Gmail should have its own Labs. As Keith Coleman, Product Manager, explained on Gmail official blog, Gmail Labs will present the most interesting ideas from Google’s software engineers.

“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,” Coleman wrote

With Gmail Labs, the users could catch a glimpse of some features and decide if they like them or not. The new service is introduced as new tab in the Settings menu of Gmail. For the moment it will be available only for the English users.

Gmail Labs includes alreadt 13 new features such as Quick Links, which lets you save searches and any other views in Gmail, Superstars, which gives you different types of stars and even a game, Old Snakey.

The cod behind those new features have been test only at a basic level, so Coleman offered and escape hatch.

Google has already released some time ago Google Talk, Labs Edition, an experimental release of the Google Talk client. It has many of the same great features as the Google Talk Gadget, including instant messaging, emoticons, and group chat. Google Talk, Labs Edition also comes with new desktop notifications from Calendar, Orkut, and Gmail.

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