I haven’t seen many others in the email community comment on the recent announcement of GMail Labs yet.
Given the buzz of activity around email in recent years (Xobni, Xoopit, ClearContext, Seriosity etc.) I was expecting that GMail Labs might actually offer some genuinely interesting enhancements to the email experience. Instead, what’s on offer is a mish-mash of tiny incremental gadgets to tweak very specific aspects of GMail. Nothing in the way of more fundamental or experimental features. (And nothing that even attempts to fix any of the long-standing problems with GMail like the automatic adding of all email correspondents to the address book, or the inability to add inline images).
Lifehacker has a run-down of the 13 features available at the launch of GMail Labs. These range from tweaks for including random signatures to the ability to view emails in fixed-width fonts – hardly innovative given such features have been available in unix email clients for, oh, a decade or two. Other features are actually more focused on chat than email (e.g., muzzle for hiding status lines, and ‘pictures in chat’).
I can only hope that things will get more interesting over time, but based on the scale of launch features which apparently warranted a media event around the launch of GMail Labs, I’m not holding my breath.
Perhaps the one bright spot is the creation of a Google Group for discussing existing Lab features and proposals for new features. At least this gives a focus for users to make their suggestions heard (though LifeHacker has been gathering such suggestions for some time now).
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what features do you hope or think they should implement ?
Comment by aaron 06.09.08 @ 9:48 amI’m not fixed on particular features, but I’d like to see something a little more significant and innovative than what’s on offer to date. For example, adding in some of the mail-trends/xobni-like data mining would be interesting.
The ability to play pong in my web-based email app doesn’t really rate highly on that scale for me.
Comment by Andrew Lampert 06.11.08 @ 10:19 amTrue, looking at the feature list they have added, it looks like they have chosen the ‘quick wins’, the easiest to develop.
So now for the theories, are they working on something huge and it’s to early even for labs or are they not throwing resources at gmail ?
thoughts ?
Comment by aaron 06.11.08 @ 11:11 amNot sure. I think GMail is quite well resourced, but I assume it’s all done in small teams. I agree about the ‘quick wins’.
According to TechCrunch, Gmail product manager Keith Coleman says that any Google employee can add their creations once they go through a simple code check.
So it certainly gives a large and easy to access testing facility for new mail features that might occur to any Google engineer. Of course, Google already has a huge internal testing base for GMail, but that’s obviously a skewed user base compared to the GMail public (at least, I assume it would be).
Not sure what any huge announcement might be. Clearly they’ll eventually launch features that integrate Open Social and other Google APIs (showing the sender or email hop points on a map or other kitschy geo-features are bound to end up in some developer’s head and turn up at some point).
Perhaps they’ll integrate a life-scanner interface so we can attach real-world objects as MIME attachments … who knows? I can only hope there are more interesting ideas coming down the pipeline.
Comment by Andrew Lampert 06.13.08 @ 9:16 pmLeave a comment
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