Keith Coleman

I have been a post-it note user for years, and Tasks on the iPhone finally got me to switch. It has come in really handy for shopping lists and notes to myself about things I need to discuss with people when I see them. - Keith Coleman

I like webnotes for putting marking websites i want to return to again and again. - Lorraine Ball

"Obama staffers turn to Gmail on Inauguration Day" - Keith Coleman

I used to have to play that part... and yes, it was awful. - Michael Kodiak

Written by our eng manager in Zurich! - Keith Coleman

Is it called snarkive? - Jim Norris

The new "g-w" keyboard shortcut to create a Google doc saves me so much time. - Keith Coleman

But now it's "until it supports Google Maps" - Bay Chang

Fast. - Keith Coleman

i love this. - Dustin

SMS is back in action after a brief prior launch. I use this feature all the time when I am late for meetings -- since it reserves a unique phone number for each contact, I just text something like "10 mins late" to the Gmail SMS number associated with someone in the meeting and it shows up in their Gmail account. - Keith Coleman

Simple lists (in Gmail Labs) - Keith Coleman

about time! - Jeff (Team マクダジ )

Just send a self-addressed stamped envelope (along with a note if you're so inclined) to: Send me some Gmail stickers already P.O. Box 391420 Mountain View, CA 94039-1420 - Keith Coleman

Mistake or (over)simplification? The "U" shortcut isn't "inbox" (as printed on the sticker) but "back to previous threadlist view" - Tudor Bosman

I've started having a lot of quick 30 second - 2 minute video conversations b/c of this feature. Saves so much typing and waiting. It's actually changed the way I work. Nice job, Sweden & Seattle. - Keith Coleman

I'm a bit late noticing that you were on friendfeed, but I wanted to say thanks for this feature. My girlfriend and I are on different continents and have been struggling to see each other on skype since she left town. We're now able to talk reliably and see each other, which is pretty awesome! Thanks! - Andrew

"Gmail Labs has been a really fun way to easily try out new ideas and get some of our pet feature requests implemented quickly. We wanted to take this to the next level and let you start adding your own stuff to Gmail. Today we're launching a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to the left-nav, next to Chat and Labels." - Keith Coleman

Pat: you are right, this does feel nicer than iGoogle; does away with the annoying issue of being logged out of Gtalk when I go to a full canvas view on the Gmail gadget and I don't want to bother popping out the Gtalk gadget. - Brett Cannon

Finally I can selectively autoreply with "I'm not sure what you are talking about, you must have the wrong person." - Keith Coleman

@kevin: Good feedback -- I sent it to Chad. Re: 404, that's just the normal rollout process for labs :) - Keith Coleman

Thanks to all the frontend engineers who made this work: "But the bigger reason this is interesting is it shows how flexible an infrastructure Google has built under Gmail. That's powerful because the company can monitor how often people use the options, and how that affects Gmail's performance and utility. And because the Gmail Labs options are largely independent of each other, Google can test many improvements simultaneously." - Keith Coleman

Jamie added options to address some of the top IMAP requests we've received - Keith Coleman

So sad you can't use this in google apps! - Gregory Cohen

You should be able to do it in Google Apps. To enable Labs there, go to your admin panel and turn on the "give me new features" option. It may take 24 hours or so to activate, but it is expected to work. (I've heard some reports of it not working for longer, though.) - Keith Coleman

how do I archive a huge inbox? Mail.app blows up on 100k msg folders... - Michael Herf

Preset to 10pm - 4am on weekends. - Keith Coleman

Love it! - Anne Bouey

smart! - Susan Beebe

Which seems more likely to you: that this will *scout* wildfires? or that it will start them when it crashes in a dry field? - Keith Coleman

I'm more shocked that this isn't being used to take pictures inside windows for Google Street View. - Ana

@Ana LOL - Anne Bouey

Woo! Go Emily! btw, I can see you! - Dustin

Plugins is conceptually what they are. But we Googlers like experiments, so labs will always suffice. - Dustin

This was one of my favorite features that never launched (we kept getting too many false positives with the prototype version back in 2005/2006). One of our interns fixed it up this summer. If you use it, let us know if you find any erroneous alerts -- the discussion group will be live soon in http://groups.google.com/group.... - Keith Coleman

I still can't use Gmail Labs in Google Apps for domain. torrez.us :( - Elias Torres

There's a setting in the Google Apps admin panel that will enable Labs on your domain. See the "New Consumer Features" part of http://www.google.com/support... - Keith Coleman

@Keith, I did, but still nothing. BTW, my Apps Gmail UI is way behind my Gmail account. - Elias Torres

Typically Gmail features are only written by 'software engineers.' Ryan, who wrote the Quote Selected Text feature in this latest batch, is an SRE. Some other Labs we've launched and/or that you'll see in the future are written by product managers, testers, etc. It's nice to have so many people contributing ideas and code. - Keith Coleman

Default "Reply to all" is scary. - Tudor Bosman

Thank you thank you thank you for "gl"! Almost perfect -- hitting "enter" without typing anything should dismiss the dialog (just like hitting "escape" or clicking "cancel"), and I think that the background color should be non-white (maybe light yellow?) -- it blends too easily into the background on my screen. - Tudor Bosman

I wish it did, Mihai. I still can't apply labels, and given I've so many, dropbox just isn't the way to go. At least the Stars can substitute some labels like @action or @finished. - Rodrigo Jaroszewski

I love this: "Over the last few months, we've been working with the IE engineers at Microsoft to address these issues: they released a critical update to their JavaScript implementation that fixed a performance problem with how the script engine allocates and frees memory." - Paul Buchheit

Paul: The problem is that after running for some time the app just becomes untenably slow. Our hypothesis was that the GC would run a collection on every allocation once there got to be too many objects, and we were exceeding that limit. I seem to recall you were quite skeptical at the time, Paul, because Gmail hadn't run into that problem. - Gabe

From Braden's trip to the aquarium - Keith Coleman

dignity - Keith Coleman

Me: gmail, infinity pool, paris hilton ad - Chris Wetherell

I don't know why they left these parts out. They seem pretty useful. - Keith Coleman

They may be more helpful than the actual review. - Anne Bouey

When will it come out for Safari? - Anne Bouey

It will work in Safari 3. We just started enabling the feature, so it might not be live on your account quite yet. - Keith Coleman

Thank you. - Anne Bouey

What? I have no idea what you're talking about - Dustin

"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." - Keith Coleman