While opening your Gmail account you may have noticed a new link New! Gmail Labs at the top right of the page. Google has introduced Gmail labs in order to experiment new and unique ideas with Gmail. It means Gmail account with new embedded features.
As said on their official blog, Google receives lots of cool ideas and suggestions from their engineers and people using Gmail i.e. Gmail end users. Gmail Labs will fill the gap between ideas and implementation. Here’s what Keith Coleman, Product Manager for Gmail says:
The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break.
To know if it’s enabled on your Gmail account, go to settings page of your Gmail account and you will see a new tab named as “Lab” . You will find many new features that can be added to your account same as in case of opensocial applications on orkut. Gmail Labs is our place to try them out and get your feedback. None of these features are really ready for prime time yet, so they may change, break or disappear at any time.
