Google Introduces Gmail Labs

Google has decided to experiment with new and unique ideas on Gmail with a new section called Gmail Labs. Google receives lots of cool ideas from employees and their users, but they don’t really implement those ideas because they are not sure, whether users will like it or not. Gmail Labs will fill the gap between ideas and implementation. Here’s what Keith Coleman, Product Manager for Gmail says:

"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.)"

Gmail Labs is slowly being rolled out to users. If it’s enabled on your account, you’ll notice a new tab in the settings page called "Labs". It has a list of experimental features (13 at the moment), you can enable or disable any of them. Some experimental features don’t work, when another labs feature is enabled (Signature tweaks and Random Signature).

Just incase, you don’t find the labs tab in your settings page. You can manually go to https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=1#settings and activate the labs feature on your account. Before you head over and start playing with Gmail Labs, please keep in mind that they are experimental. It may break, change or disappear without any notice.