Google trials new Gmail features

Google will invite users to try new features the company is considering adding to its Gmail service, the company said Thursday.

Credit: CNET News.com

Early this morning users have been given a selection of 13 new features in a "labs" tab in the Gmail settings page, said Keith Coleman, a Gmail product manager.

"The idea is you can do whatever you want, get it out to tens of millions of people, and get feedback," Coleman said. And popular features will be incorporated into Gmail proper.

Among the new features that are possible:

• A quick-link tool that lets people bookmark specific Gmail messages.
• Superstars, which lets people select custom stars to label mail.
• The "email addict" tool that lets people lock themselves out of their email account for 15 minutes.
• A fixed-width font option to view a message within a font whose characters are the same width — handy for some formatting challenges.

For now at least, only Google engineers can add features. "Any engineer can code a labs feature," Coleman said. "Once the code is written and mostly working, it'll get into the next product build that goes to users" through the labs feature.

Eventually, though, the company is interested in opening the system up to outsiders if it can find a way to integrate outside code.

"We'd like to get to a point where more people can build on this. That would require something with a different level of interface," Coleman said. "We're interested in making it possible of users and us to iterate on the product faster, so it's something we're interested in."

Google is trying to be open-minded with the feature additions for now.

"There are some things in here we think are probably bad ideas," Jackson said, pointing specifically to a snake game that's one of the 13 features that's amusing but probably not a great idea for mainstream deployment. "It's something we would never do."

The code behind the new features has been vetted at a basic level, but not otherwise heavily tested or screened.