Google Wants Gmail Users To Test New Features

Google launched GMail Labs Thursday, accessible through Gmail's Settings page, which includes a list of experimental features. Users can enable or disable each one and Google will eventually incorporate the more popular ones into its core products, according to Keith Coleman, a product manager at Google, in the company's Gmail blog site.

"Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn't normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they're good or not," Coleman wrote. "Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we'll eventually retire the ones that don't get much use. We've put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it."

The concept behind Gmail Labs is similar to Google Enterprise Labs, launched last fall to help users more quickly provide feedback on new features.

"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," Coleman wrote in the blog.

Google, Mountain View, Calif., receives many suggestions from users regarding Gmail, and Labs is a more cohesive approach to garner useful information, according to the company.

"There's only so much we can do at any one time," Coleman wrote in the blog. "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."

There are currently 13 features in Labs with more on the way, Coleman wrote. Features include Quick Links, which lets you save searches and other views in Gmail; Superstars, which gives users different types of stars; and Old Snakey, an "old-school-style computer game."