Gmail Labs hopefully the key to rapid mail innovation
So it was with much excitement yesterday that Google announced it’s then impending Gmail Labs project. Basically it’s a place for Googlers to easily get their 20% Gmail time in front of Gmail users quickly and easily. The feedback loop is tightened by providing each lab project a Google Group. This is, on the face of it, really exciting stuff. Getting these small project in front of everyone and letting them talk back to the developers easily and personally could be just the fuel needed for an innovation boom in the web email front.
The Bad
Then why, since it’s launch, have I been seeing some ho-hum response to it? Part of the problem may be that there isn’t a killer feature there, my personal favourites right now are Quick links, Custom keyboard shortcuts and Fixed width font, two hacks to allow you to basically create a link in your right nav to any bookmarkable page (any search for example) which is really useful for quickly making smart folders, customizing the keyboard shortcut list and changing the font of an email into a mono-spaced font (what can I say, I’m a developer). But none of these are rocking anyone’s world, useful features to be sure, but if we’re all being honest with each other (and honesty is the best policy, right?), at this point Greasemonkey probably provides more functionality than Gmail labs.
The Hopeful
But it’s early in Gmail labs’ life. The important fact is that this forum for showing off a bunch of hacks exists and that the developers may make themselves accessible to the public (something notoriously not happening prior to this). Thus far my random perusals of the forums haven’t shown any gmail devs commenting, but again, things are early. The architecture and proximity of users and developers hopefully allows the devs to quickly iterate on the most popular ideas so that a project that shows some promise can quickly evolve into something powerful and useful based on actual live user requests instead of imagined use cases. Remember big ideas can start very small.
The Future
Here’s my suggestion to make this thing more exciting. Don’t bury the labs in the über nav and the settings tab. No one looks there, I wouldn’t have seen labs if I hadn’t read explicitly that it was in the settings tab, I just assumed it hadn’t rolled out to me, yet. Put it in the main interface somewhere, like an accordion box in the left nav, initially showing the x most popular and dropping down to show them all with little flyout descriptions. It should be made easy and obvious, otherwise, only early adopter/tech type people will be using them and that’s a very self selected group of individuals with particular perspective.
I hope that Labs provides mechanisms for deeper modifications, the Super Stars feature is cool allowing you to choose one of several types of stars to help categorize things. Unfortunately, without the ability to search for particular star types, it just isn’t that useful. Nevertheless, even without this, I think it’s a great step for Google to take in the ever escalating email wars and we, the consumers, reap all the benefit! If Google would at some point, provide a public API so anyone could build Gmail apps as easily as OpenSocial ones, well, hot damn, that would drive a lot of adoption. In many respects, this is the opposite of Microsoft’s working habits, where nothing small ever comes out, where even small ideas grow and grow into monster platforms, delivered many months and years later.
Have you seen labs yet? Which are your favourites or is the whole thing just sleepy sleepy time for you?
UPDATE: Steve Hodson adds his voice to the distinctly uninmpressed list. My confidence is wavering in this with my thoughts travelling back to that time when I firmly believed that Google Base was going to pose a serious threat to Craigslist. True to Google’s nearly unbroken record of terribly unimpressive product launches backed by none of the might and will of the megacorporation, Labs could have been much more boldly positioned and it should have come out swinging with at least one killer app. Nevertheless, I harbour hope for this because email is definitely a hotly contested area where Google does not dominate and this move positions the users closer to Google devs than ever before which will hopefully start a virtuous cycle. What? Too optimistic?
