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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."
For the first one, yes, you're right but for the second one there's a workaround: try acessing GMail with http://mail.google.com/?nocheckbrowser . It works great on Opera 9.5 (atleast for me).
[insert lame sig here]
> it seems as though Google Apps is treated a
> bit like a secondary service.
On the contrary - it is a primary service which people are paying for, and as such not a place to release playground software. If you provide people a service they pay for, your prime objective is to deliver a stable service. Goofing around may cause some fun, but imagine the outcry if something in Gmail Labs broke the service that people are paying for.
> Is the ad revenue generated more than me
> paying for the service?
Probably, but that's not the reason for labs not being available to you.
> Are the services too different that they
> must use completely different infrastructure
No.
> Or, are the Google Apps aimed at people who
> really don't want new features and services?
No - and eventually, when a feature has proven stable and functional, it will propagate.
>All I want for Christmas is rich text (links,
>images) in my gmail signature...
Fine, as long as they also enable me to filter out images and "rich" formatting.
Bikers.....The only people that understand why a dog hangs his head out a car window.
You should try asking them. All I wanted for Christmas was group chat and now I seem to be in some sort of group chat beta. While most of my friends can't initiate group chats I've got some extra icons in my user interface that lets me set them up. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure how I got into it other than I sent some feedback using the form buried in the gmail help and it magically appeared.
So who know, if you ask for it you might just get it.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
For example, I regularly get a bunch of e-mails from an automated bot over which I have no control. For some reason the e-mail bot gives all sent mail the same subject line although the message contents varies. So GMail automatically decides to group these e-mails into few conversations (not one conversation but one per day or something like that). This in turn prevents me from handling these messages by tags, because tag scope is the whole conversation, not a single message.
The only solution for this is to handle these e-mails in Thunderbird via IMAP, where conversations don't exist and I can just take the messages and tag them one by one.
Noooo! Just no...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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
Really? How dare they roll out their free additional features for their free product on their schedule. Don't the know everyone in the world is entitled to everything they do immediately?
It's gotta be simple to do, right? After all, you could do it in five minutes with your eyes closed and both hands jammed up your own ass to hold your head there.