Google opens up a lab for others to test new Gmail features
With Gmail finally nearing the end of its nearly four year long beta, Google is looking to test out a few new features before it goes live.
A new tab has been added in the settings menu of Gmail called "Labs." Included there are 13 features that the user can either enable or disable, as well as links to provide feedback on the functionality.
"Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn't normally pick and let you all decide whether they're good or not," product manager Keith Coleman said. He added that the company plans to add additional add-ons in the near future.
The most popular features have a good chance of making it in to the actual Gmail product. While currently the company is limiting development to only internal coders, it hopes to eventually open the process up to third parties.
Some of the suggested features, such as Old Snakey -- a keyboard-based snake game -- and E-Mail Addict -- a feature that locks you out of your e-mail for up to to fifteen minutes -- will likely never make it into Gmail, others show real promise.
Among them:
- a quick links function which allows one-click access to any bookmarkable URL within the client;
- the option to view messages in a fixed width font;
- a method to navigate through Gmail using mouse gestures;
- custom date formatting; and
- the option to hide unread date counts.
"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," Coleman said of the project.
He also added that the company has a few more features it wants to add into Gmail, but it will finally shed the beta tag that it has held onto since its launch in 2004.