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Google's playground grows up

• Maggie Shiels
• 15 Jul 09, 09:57 GMT

For the last three years has been a playground for the company's engineers to float new ideas and see how users respond to them.

Everything about the project has been experimental with no promises made to users that any of these features would become permanent and enter the mainstream of the Gmail front page.

Gmail's product manager Keith Coleman told me:

"On launch day we had 12 things in labs and didn't really know if any of them would be popular or whether or not users would really use them.
 
"In the past we would have tested these features inside the company but Labs brought that to the rest of the world and let all users have input into which ideas are the best and which really work."

In Google speak this is called "". I prefer "people power".

Today there are 48 labs features and they range from letting you customise keyboard shortcuts to translating messages and from seeing your e-mail offline to getting alerts to tell you take a break from e-mail and step away from the computer.

While Keith said it's not a popularity contest, the users have spoken and "tasks" is the first lab project to graduate to the Gmail shop floor.

It can be found on the left hand side under contacts and is a nifty wee application that lets you keep a tab on everything from drinks with the girls to your shopping list to a visit to the dentist. I haven't had long to play with it, but now I have even less excuse for forgetting stuff.

Google have show off some of its capabilities.

Other features that look set to graduate include pictures in chat that shows the photograph of the person you are chatting to and something else called undo send, that I think might save a few blushes here and there. That functions allows you to basically unsend an e-mail.

At the same time Google has also announced that it is opening up product.

There are only a handful of offerings there but at first glance they seem pretty useful in helping organise ones life...and boy one needs it!

The world clock will be really useful for me working on the west coast eight hours behind my London bosses and three behind my Washington editors.

As Google looks more and more to cater to its enterprise customers, Calendar product manager Ken Norton told me that "the other interesting news is that Calendar Labs will come with a set of APIs for customers to add their own features that are important to them but not to the wider user."

He talked of one customer who wanted to be able to know when he books a conference room if that room had a microscope in it. Obviously not a vital piece of information for all users and as Ken said it's something Google wouldn't build so it said "here are a set of APIs so you can create a calendar for your own unique needs."

Naturally enough I quizzed both men on the fact that they were making their announcements at the same time as Microsoft was telling its partner conference in New Orleans about its new free .

While neither gent wanted to take that issue head on, Mr Norton pointed out that:

"The first thing that Labs speaks to is how quickly you can innovate in the cloud. In the desktop software world you have to ship updates.
 
"You can't put new features in front of users when you like. You are subject to the software distribution model. Our products were built in the cloud and we are always releasing new features to users on a rapid basis."

Last year I was one of a few journalists who were allowed inside the hallowed halls of the Gmail team to see what they were working on and hear the history of how the product came to pass.