Google Gmail 20% Time Evolution – New Toys To Play With!

Yesterday, June 5, 2008, Google began offering new features for Gmail users available with just a few mouse clicks. Some of the new features are:

* a module for quick links (saved searches, important messages)
* superstars (additional star icons)
* pictures in Gmail chat
* fixed width font
* custom keyboard shortcuts
* mouse gestures
* random signature
* signature tweaks (places the signature before the quoted text)
* custom date format
* muzzle (hide the status of your contacts in Gmail chat)
* play Snake inside Gmail
* email addict (blocks the screen for 15 minutes)
* hide unread count

What is the 20% that Google talks about?

“The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that’s broken, you can use the time to fix it.”

Google’s engineers may work on many side-projects related to Gmail and this could be an opportunity for users to try them, send feedback or influence which features should be further developed and added to Gmail. It’s not clear if that’s the right interpretation for Google’s intentionally-ambiguous text, but we’ll find out next Thursday.

So how does one access these new features? Simple. On your Google Gmail account site, just click on  Settings and at the next screen click on Tabs. You can enable or disable the new features as you like. Give them a try and see what you think.

Source.