Taking GMail Labs for a spin

Google recently unveiled GMail Labs, experimental features that Google engineers are working on out of their 20%.

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. (There's an escape hatch.)

I've been testing a few features, and already I'm loving some of them.

Quick Links lets me add bookmarks to access searches, conversations, and even shortcuts to specific GMail settings.

Email Addict puts you offline for 15 minutes and renders your GTalk status invisible. Great for those who need to walk away from the computer once in a while. Problem is, reloading the page will undo the lock-out.

Those are my two picks. I'm not particularly hot about the other features so far: Superstars, Muzzle, "Old Snakey".

One other feature caught my eye, though: Random Signature. Remember when you used fortune for your random sigs? Well, here's the Web 2.0 version: the feature allows you to use a feed for the random signature. I plugged in my tumblog feed, and watched as "Compose Mail" generated a random feed entry -- surreal and almost Zen-like. ;)

GMail Labs is supposed to be also available for Google Apps, but like @JeromeGotangco, mine doesn't seem to have the feature yet.