#comments

Remember Gmail Labs? Happened just over a month ago? I was pretty psyched about the whole thing (although, I think I was the only one). I thought this was going to allow a tighter feedback loop between end users and developers and was going to usher in a golden era of wondrous mail innovation.

Yeah.

None of the starting apps were particularly interesting, though some were definitely useful. I figured, that was just the beginning. So I’ve kept my eye on the labs tab in Gmail. I don’t think anything new’s been added in that time. I’m pretty bummed about that, I figured, one of the points of labs was to allow easy access to getting new functionality on there without having to go through a whole process. With the high profileness and potential to do some really cool things, I was sure that this would swiftly become a huge test bed were tons of new functionality was thrown against a wall to see what stuck. Sigh.

Undeterred, I thought, well, let’s take a look at the discussion groups. That was a huge part of why I was excited about this a direct line to the guys doing the work should really foster some quick updates and interesting talk about how things work, what was possible, what wasn’t. So I jumped over to the groups to take a gander.

Clicking through several of the groups revealed the same pattern over and over. In total a few hundred threads, almost all of them (especially after the first day or two of labs) having no replies. The ones that did have replies (rarely more than 1) were generally replied to by another person agreeing or disagreeing. As far as I could tell, no google employee, developer or not, ever wrote anything in the group.

Well so much for that. While I still think the potential for greatness is there, it seems that Google has again launched a feature with no backing and no internal support. (not that I know anything about anything internal there, I just figure, if it actually had support something would actually have happened by now, anything) I suspect this is one of the things that drove that guy who quit Google to go back to Microsoft to actually do so.

It’s as though Google thinks, if we really support this and it fizzles everyone will make fun of us! But if we just roll it out and then stand here smoking by the lockers and pretending not to care, then if it doesn’t work, well we don’t care anyway. We’re cool. And it drives me crazy. Just freaking do something and stand by it.