Keith Coleman

How much taller? And why? - Keith Coleman

In the spirit of labs giving excess options, it should probably be an option or draggable or something. I would make it about 1/2 window height. I need it because of long im messages, especially the ones from ff. - Paul Buchheit

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 via Bookmarklet

Tony: Updating Google Talk leaves all the Mac users out. Now if I could just get a free VNC client or something that punched through firewalls well on Macs I could install this for my parents now instead of next time I see them. - Brett Cannon

Brett: If you use the listening VNC viewer, you can have your parents make their VNC server connect to you. - Gabe

"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 via Bookmarklet

Pat, directions to get FriendFeed into Gmail here: http://friendfeed.com/e/75f41e... - Benjamin Golub

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

LOL - Roger Chen

oh shit..... - Baard Overgaard Hansen

Hah hah. That's great! - Nate

"This is why I love our readers: David, aka "Logo Fiend" has dug around United States Patent and Trademark Office's Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) and found the registered work for the new Pepsi, Mtn Dew and Gatorade work. Now, this doesn't mean it will all be used or that this will be its ultimate form, but if it's been registered or trademarked it sure won't be too different. I alluded to a scoop in the previous post, but this is not it, this is a bonus! So, thanks David, and enjoy everyone." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet

Strange: Retro font, and screwing with the graphic is a big mistake. - Chris Baskind

New Pepsi?! Been a while since I've heard that one... - Amir H.

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

This is awesome, I have been wanting this for a long time, especially the autoresponses, I was using Texter but it never worked right. You gotta love Gmail! - Kelly Johns

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

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

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

Right Hand Chat/Labels don't work with Navbar Drag and Drop - Benjamin Golub

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

although it could backfire and make you not want to eat it just the same - Josh Haley

or make you eat something you don't want to... - Paul Haahr

when I was younger this was much simpler. you'd just lick all of your french fries while everyone was looking. - Keith Coleman

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

I don't know which part of this article is more bizarre: a guy hitting a bear on a bike, or the fact that there's a place called "Target Range Middle School" - Keith Coleman

I'm disappointed, I thought the bear was on the bike. - Jim Norris

At least the bear scratched his back before he left. - Jim Norris

I wonder who was frightened more, the bear or the teacher? - Sebastian Kanthak

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

Yay, you guys have now obsoleted all my Greasemonkey scripts. - Mihai Parparita

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

Here's the KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/k... - Keith Coleman

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

my keys - j1m

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

Do you guys have a name? - Keith Coleman

Yay for cute babies meeting cute babies - Keith Coleman

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

Great article. - Aaron Myers

@Adam Lasnik: Amen. :-) - Voyagerfan5761

Anything that requires me to press ENTER is too inconvenient to use on my tablet. All UIs should give me the option to press a button. - Kenneth LeFebvre

"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

Cool. But what does lunch have to do with it? :) - Chris White

"The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs." - Turker Keskinpala

Only if the household computers also mix drinks... - Jim Norris

not bad? you mean, only about once per sentence do they predict something completely unlike anything that now exists? - j1m