Gmail Labs Lets Users Experiment With 13 New Features

D Ninja writes "Yesterday, Google released Gmail Labs, which allows Gmail developers to decide what to include in the next feature releases of Gmail based on user feedback. As ZDNet has pointed out, essentially users are guinea pigs for these new features. Participants will vote on their favorite new features, and the ones that are voted the highest will stick around and the ones that are least popular will disappear." Reader physman_wiu points out an article at the BBC about the experiments on offer, writing: "Some of the features are really nice — like the option to use additional star icons, mouse gestures, and custom keyboard shortcuts. Others ... well, let's just say Old Snakey made it in."

HTML signatures

[an.echte.trilingue]

All I want for Christmas is rich text (links, images) in my gmail signature... third party extensions do this but they are are a PITA

Google Apps likes shiney new things too!

[definate]

I have Google Apps for your domain, which I liked so much I wanted to pay for it. However, now that I have it seems I am "protected" from the bleeding edge settings.

I want to test these features, and see the bleeding edge technology.

I have selected the "Turn on new features" and "Automatically add new Google services", however it seems as though Google Apps is treated a bit like a secondary service.

Is the ad revenue generated more than me paying for the service? Are the services too different that they must use completely different infrastructure and so changes in one takes time to bring across to the other? Or, are the Google Apps aimed at people who really don't want new features and services?

Fix bugs first, please.

[Anonymous Coward]

The new features are all very nice, but I would like to see Google to fix all the bugs* in their IMAP-Implementation first.

*)
http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-imap-implementation

Why the vote?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they want to base which features to keep on voting? Isn't the usage a much better measure to go by?

Offtopic:
The same applies to social networking sites, where the frontpages seems to be always based only on votes, while I think it should be based on votes, clicktrough-rate and number of comments; i.e. there are some great frontpage-worthy articles on reddit's controversial-tab with 0 points (500 upvotes, 500 downvotes) and 200+ comments.

One feature I really miss...

[bogaboga]

The ability to display a few days of my calendar at the bottom of the message text box (while typing) is what I really miss. This feature is available with Yahoo mail by default. If there are important events coming up, you see these as they scroll...sweet! I hope they will implement it.

Re:HTML signatures

[smallfries]

You should try asking them. All I wanted for Christmas was group chat and now I seem to be in some sort of group chat beta. While most of my friends can't initiate group chats I've got some extra icons in my user interface that lets me set them up. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure how I got into it other than I sent some feedback using the form buried in the gmail help and it magically appeared.

So who know, if you ask for it you might just get it.

But not conversation disabling...

[ladybugfi]

I'm disappointed that there is no option to disable conversations either globally or per conversation. This really sucks and shows that the Google people assume way too much on how people handle their e-mail.

For example, I regularly get a bunch of e-mails from an automated bot over which I have no control. For some reason the e-mail bot gives all sent mail the same subject line although the message contents varies. So GMail automatically decides to group these e-mails into few conversations (not one conversation but one per day or something like that). This in turn prevents me from handling these messages by tags, because tag scope is the whole conversation, not a single message.

The only solution for this is to handle these e-mails in Thunderbird via IMAP, where conversations don't exist and I can just take the messages and tag them one by one.

IMAP import

[Rui Lopes]

What I want is the support for external IMAP-based accounts. Currently one can only do that for POP-based. Only then I'll be able to ditch completely desktop mail apps (which suck a lot, btw).

Data on usage habits

[sjbe]

I'm disappointed that there is no option to disable conversations either globally or per conversation. This really sucks and shows that the Google people assume way too much on how people handle their e-mail.

I agree personally on the feature request but it's interesting you say Google "assumes". Since it is a web mail service they probably have extensive data on exactly how everyone uses the Gmail. Plus they get feedback from their own use as well as from users. Perhaps it is just not a feature in high demand? Or perhaps it is a designed in "feature" kind of like Apple's one button mouse that they are disinclined to change? Who knows for sure...

That said, I would like tagging to not ALWAYS work on a per conversation basis. I don't mind if that is the defaults but I'd like to be able to make other choices when it makes sense. I agree there are times when it's not the most appropriate basis for sorting mail and I would like to be able to choose.