News.com reports that, Google is finally making some highly visible changes in Gmail. It has introduced a new ‘Labs’ option for Gmail. The ‘Lab’ option will incorporate 13 new features in Gmail and will be available on a ‘Test’ basis to users worldwide from 6 pm. PDT, Thursday. These features can be enabled and disabled from the Gmail ’settings’ page.

According to Keith Coleman (Gmail product manager), “The idea is you can do whatever you want, get it out to tens of millions of people, and get feedback.”

Some of the possible new features are:

1. A quick-link tool that lets people bookmark specific Gmail messages.
2. The “e-mail addict” tool that lets people lock themselves out of their e-mail account for 15 minutes.
3. A fixed-width font option to view a message with in a font whose characters are the same width–handy for some formatting challenges.
4. Mouse gestures that let users take actions based on mouse movements.
5. Signature tweaks that let people automatically add a signature file above quoted text in an e-mail reply.

Keith Coleman further added, “Any engineer can code a labs feature. Once the code is written and mostly working, it’ll get into the next product build that goes to users.” It basically means that, for now only engineers are allowed to add features.

When asked as to why Gmail, has been in the Beta phase for the last years, Coleman replied, “We have really high standards. There are a few things we want to do before we take it out of beta, but we expect to do it soon.”

Some significant changes in Gmail had been long overdue and Google has brought some interesting features to Gmail.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 12:20 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.