Experimental Gmail Features

As promised last week, Gmail added a labs section to showcase some new experimental features created by Google engineers.

Gmail Labs allows you to try out experimental new features in Gmail and send feedback to us so we can improve them. If you're going to brave the Labs world, it's important to keep the following things in mind about these features:

* They may break at any time
* Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently
* They may work so well that they graduate and become regular features

The labs section is available as a new settings tab in the English version of Gmail (you could change your language to see it) and it includes 13 new features: some are very useful, other are just for fun. You need to enable each one to see it in action, but unlike Google Experimental Search, you can enable more than one experimental feature at a time.


Here are some of the most useful new features:
* quick links - a new module displayed below Gmail Chat that lets bookmark Gmail views. For example, you can search for something and then click on "add to quick links" to save the search in the sidebar. This can also be used to bookmark important conversations or settings sections. I suggested in an earlier post some useful Gmail queries.

* super-stars - if you use Gmail's star for different things (flag important conversations, flag conversations for follow-up) and you want to differentiate them, you now have more icons for starring messages. Just click on the star repeatedly to toggle between the different states. The feature is very limited because you can't search for messages that were starred with a different icon.


* custom keyboard shortcuts - if you find the current shortcuts offered by Gmail strange and unintuitive, you can remap them. After enabling this feature, a new Settings tab will let you choose the shortcuts for some of the most useful actions. For example, you can replace the "!" shortcut with the more intuitive "S" for marking messages as spam.

* mouse gestures should be familiar to Opera users. You can move your mouse in a direction and associate this movement with an action. Here's what you can do in Gmail: "hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view."

The other 9 features are less interesting, but some people could still find some use for them:
* show avatars in Gmail chat
* view messages in fixed width font
* place the signature before the quoted text (many Gmail users complained about this in the past)
* random signature from a feed (you can use Google to find some feeds)
* custom date formats
* hide your friends' status messages in Gmail chat
* Snake - that's right, you can now play "Old Snakey" inside Gmail.


* email addict - 15 minutes of break from Gmail for those who need to do other things than reading their mail
* hide unread count - you'll no longer see in the sidebar the number of unread messages from your inbox, the spam folder or other labels.

All in all, there are some useful features and Google promises to monitor people's interest and add the most popular features in the standard Gmail. Hopefully, users will be able to write their own plugins and submit them to a library of Gmail features.

Google insisted that these new features were written by Google engineers in their 20% time, so they're far from being polished. "There is a code review vetting process to make sure it doesn't break, but no user interface analysis or product analysis. It just has to be functional code to push out. Features can literally modify anything in the Gmail code base," mentions TechCrunch. If something goes wrong, you can temporarily disable Gmail Labs and enter in a "safe mode" by going to http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

Public Transit Directions in Mobile Google Maps

The latest version of Google Maps for Mobile includes an option that was already available in Google Maps: directions for public transportation. Google's coverage has been continuously expanded in the past months to many US states, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, important cities from Canada, Italy, France, UK and Australia. Google Maps is one of the applications that is very useful when you are on the go and this new feature is a good alternative to the existing driving directions.

"This version of Google Maps for mobile even has a few tricks not yet available on the desktop version of Google Maps. For instance, you can find the last transit trips of the day (to figure out how late you can stay at the party) and more easily browse through earlier or later trips," suggests Google Mobile blog.

You can download the latest version of the mobile Google Maps for Blackberry and Java-enabled phones by visiting www.google.com/gmm on your mobile phone or by following the instructions from Google's site.

Richer Local Search Results in Google Maps

Google Maps shows enhanced local search results. Compared to the previous format, Google Maps lets you find more information about the local businesses without having to click on each result. You can see a thumbnail, an excerpt from the most recent review and a link that encourages to post your own review. This format was already used in the text view, but probably few people noticed it.


Excerpts from reviews are included in local search OneBoxes as well, but Google chooses different reviews. Judging from these changes, I think businesses will start to upload images to the Local Business Center and will encourage their customers to post reviews to Google Maps or other sites.

Google Talk Adds Invisible Status

Some Google applications need a lot of time to add even the most basic features. Gmail Chat added the invisible status in February and now this feature is also available in the Google Talk gadget and in Google Talk Labs Edition. Don't ask about the classic Google Talk client, which was last updated in January 2007.


In a previous post, many people argued that it's not wise to add the invisible status because the instant messaging becomes less useful as more people become "invisible". "It's like one-way spying. If you're going to be online to see if your friends are online, at least have the respect to show other people that you're online. What happens if both you and your friend want to talk to each other, but are both on invisible? You'll never discover that you're online," commented Jyvyn.

One solution for this problem could be to show different statuses, depending on your contacts. "What would be most helpful would be some sort of 'group block' or 'group invisible'. I have a number of work contacts that use g-chat so I need to be on and available, but often I am interrupted by friends wanting to chat and I have to ignore them or interrupt my work to explain I can't talk. If I could add all my work contacts to a group, and show my status to them as online, while showing everyone else away, invisible, or even offline - now that would be useful," said nauthiz693.

Integrating Gmail's contact groups with Google Talk is an obvious next step, but this might require many months of coding. After all, adding the invisible status is probably the second most notable feature added by Google Talk this year, after the chatback badges.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

No More Video Plus Boxes in Google's Results

Google used to have a feature that allowed you to watch videos from YouTube and Google Video inside the search results. Launched in May 2007, the video plus box was a quick way to play videos without having to load the entire page of a video hosting site. For some reason, Google only limited the plus box to its own video sites (YouTube and Google Video), while showing thumbnails and metadata for other sites.


Yahoo Search added a similar feature in October for YouTube, Metacafe and Yahoo Video, but now the plus box is nowhere to be found in Google's results:


Instead of making the feature available for other video sites, Google decided to remove it altogether. Hopefully there's a better explanation than increasing the number of page views for YouTube and Google Video, as Google usually puts the user first.

iGoogle Tooltips for Reading Feeds

When hovering over a feed gadget, iGoogle displays the content of each post in a tooltip so you can read it without having to visit the web page or to expand the post. Since Google uses the title attribute, tooltips don't preserve the original formatting, may be truncated and they also have issues with special characters.

iGoogle tooltip in Internet Explorer 7

Other personalized homepages like Netvibes and My Yahoo show a snippet from the post in a custom overlay and open a reader to display the full content. Loading multiple instances of the Google Reader gadget for different folders is a good alternative for iGoogle's feed modules, especially if you subscribe to many feeds.

{ Thanks, Stephen. }

YouTube Annotations

YouTube added a new feature for video creators: annotations. "Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Use them to add background information about the video, create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene) or link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video."


You can add annotations by going to the list of uploaded videos and clicking on "Edit annotations" or by visiting one of your videos while you are logged in. There are three types of annotations that can be added while playing the video: speech bubbles, notes and spotlights, as you can see in the screenshot above.


Here's a live example of interactivity that can be added to a YouTube video (also notice the updated embeddable player that looks the same as the player from YouTube's site). The following short video:


can be transformed into a much more engaging content with clickable annotations that point to other videos. For now, only video creators can add annotations, but it would be nice to allow any user to comment on a specific moment from a video (a la Viddler) or to add funny speech bubbles.

{ Thanks, Dan. }