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Gmail Labs Lets Users Experiment With 13 New Features
D Ninja writes "Yesterday, Google released Gmail Labs, which allows Gmail developers to decide what to include in the next feature releases of Gmail based on user feedback. As ZDNet has pointed out, essentially users are guinea pigs for these new features. Participants will vote on their favorite new features, and the ones that are voted the highest will stick around and the ones that are least popular will disappear."
Reader physman_wiu points out an article at the BBC about the experiments on offer, writing: "Some of the features are really nice — like the option to use additional star icons, mouse gestures, and custom keyboard shortcuts. Others ... well, let's just say Old Snakey made it in."
1) Doesn't work unless you use GMail in English.
2) Doesn't work unless you use Firefox 2 or IE 7.
Sorry, folks... work on it a bit more!
It is in plain English in the full article. Its the old school snake game.
-- Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -- Albert Einstein
From the article: Labs is now out to all English users (US and UK), and administrators using Google Apps can choose to enable Labs by checking the "Turn on new features" box in Domain Settings.
Scorta futuere amo!
It's stable, but sometimes the changes take awhile to propagate. I've noticed changes appear first on my @gmail.com address then later (days or weeks) will become available on my Google Apps for Domain accounts.
If you want to play with bleeding edge new features on Gmail, get a free @gmail.com address.
If you want to complain, /. isn't the place unless you like talking to an empty void that can't do anything about it. Google is who you need to send your complaints to.
I've noticed Google fills my "talking to an empty void" needs quite nicely. Every time I have sent a help desk email, or tried to get help, I usually get nowhere.
(The exceptions have been problems setting up Postini and trouble with the Calendar losing whole calendars)
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yes, because as Google explain in their Labs Blog but the BBC failed to explain in the linked article, these labs features are not intended to be mainstream mail features, they are little tweaks written by Google staff in their '20% time', the time that Google gives their developers to work on pet projects.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Go to this page and suggest turning off conversations as a new feature. A lot of people have been saying the same thing. Right now there is no way to disable it, but if enough people suggest that they add the option to disable it, it might make it in the next upgrade. https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/
Physics is imagination in a straight jacket. ~John Moffat
You remind me of the secretary's at a previous employer. When they discovered Powerpoint in about 2000, we would get emails with a Powerpoint attachment whose content included things like "The staff meeting has been postponed" or "The traffic on I83 is really bad", replete with colors, animations, and 20 different fonts. The problem was that about 1/2 of the staff worked remotely over dial-up, and attempting to open one of these missives would crash Outlook, Windows, and lock up the processor, requiring a reboot. And there was no escape -0 as soon as you opened Outlook it would attempt to download, and lock up before one was able to go offline and delete the bastard.
In summary, KNOCK IT OFF - no one likes those dumbass signatures; your regular correspondents are simply to polite to tell you.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
As a paying customer, you have a phone number. If they don't answer an email, phone up and ask for a supervisor and bitch. It's no different than you'd treat any other company.
(obDisclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the gmail department)
I thought group chat has been available to everyone for a while now... From an internal chat window I just go to Options -> Group Chat. My friends can all do this to.
A. Because it breaks the logical order of conversation. Q. Why is top posting bad?
Seriously, reply *after* the relevant bits of what you are replying to, and remove the rest. Your emails will be far shorter, they will make sense when you read through them much later, and you will no longer be fighting the email program.
"Most people" prefer top posting because that's what Outlook does, not because it's practical, readable, or efficient.
If memory serves me back to a few years ago when I signed up for Gmail (back when it was invite only! haha. the good ol' days), the sign-up page had in big font something like "We do email differently!". So I'm not sure its fair to say they assume things too much and do what they want; from the beginning, they advertised the conversational email as a major feature that they were experimenting with (along with tagging and archiving instead of simply creating folders). Thus, you could fairly safely say that anyone that signed up for it was interested in the new interface. If you buy lots of cherry cola from a soft drink company, they're going to believe people like cherry cola and probably produce more. Same idea, at least to me, and I don't see how that's a wrong assumption to make.
That being said, it's popular enough now that there should probably be more customization options; but, maybe its a situation not often encountered? For instance, my Gmail is pretty good about sticking conversations together, so unless you tell them specifics on your problem, they may not even be aware it's a problem.