Showing posts with label Google Labs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Labs. Show all posts
Over a year and a half ago Google launched Gmail Labs. A platform where Google engineers can come up with new features for Gmail and add it to Gmail Labs where millions of users can grab it for enhanced user experience and for user its a new thing to try out. Gmail Labs, was one of the important and probably the best move from Google which is very popular among the users now a days.

Till now, there are 60 Labs features available in Gmail, where many features are very useful and some are not. It's a total opt-in and customized feature, so user can activate or deactivate according to there usage patterns.

The early bird were Gmail Task and offline Gmail who graduate first from the labs & Right-side Labels was first to retire. Today, another six are graduating and five are retiring from Gmail Labs.

Graduating:
  1. Search Autocomplete
  2. Go To Label
  3. Forgotten Attachment Detector
  4. YouTube Previews
  5. Custom Label Colors
  6. Vacation Dates
Retiring:
  1. Muzzle
  2. Fixed Width Font
  3. Email Addict
  4. Location in Signature
  5. Random Signature
According to Gmail team,These decisions were made based on usage and user feedback so some user may be loos their favorite lab feature or some will gain. Also, the graduates are getting new updates and tweake before, it becomes part of default Gmail features.
Let's see, what kind of updates graduates are getting.
Now Go To Label integrated with Search Auto-complete into the search box, so now you're able to search, from mail to contact names to labels.

Many times we all forget to attach a file to the email and send it then sheepishly send another email with the forgotten attachment. here, Forgotten Attachment Detector save you from that embarrassment. It looks for phrases in your email body and subject line, that suggest you meant to attach a file and alerts you if it looks like you forgot an attachment.

Probably, many of your friends often email you YouTube video links. Instead of having to clicking on the link and wait for a new window to load before you can watch the video, Gmail shows inline YouTube previews right below the message. All you have to do is click the play button and enjoy the video without leaving gmail.

Custom Label Colors, which allows you to assign custom color to labels and you can create color based labeling system in Gmail. there are around 4000 possible color combination to choose.

If you specify in advance that, on which dates you'll be away in vacation responder then, you won't have to remember to turn on the vacation responder. It will send automated emails on the specific date you already choose to your contacts.

According to Gmail, Over the next few days, you'll see Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature stop working and disappear from the Labs tab and new graduate will be part of default Gmail so you won't be able to disable it.

Many user like the new graduates and many don't like it. personally I like the location based signature. It was a good feature, when you roam place to place, it adds location into your email as part of signature, unfortunately its going for retirement now. Which labs feature you like the most and which feature should Gmail add or bring back in Labs? Share your point of view with us, in comment.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
As you all using Google Labs and Gmail Labs, after great success to their Lab products for Gmail & Search now Google created Labs for Toolbar so people can play with the features and functionality like we already do in Gmail Labs

Google also roll out first two Labs versions of Toolbar.
  • Google Toolbar with My Location
  • Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar
Google Toolbar with My Location

With Toolbar with My Location, both Google Maps and the included Maps gadget automatically center on your current location which run on Google's IP based local search technology. It can be very useful when you are searching for restaurant and you can see your location and nearby location for restaurants. We can able to use the search to find Wi-Fi Hot Spot. Right now Google Toolbar with My Location is only available in the U.S.
  • See your location on Google Maps
  • Search more easily for places of interest near you
  • Get locally relevant results when searching on Google
Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar
  • Translate pages instantly with a single click
  • Manage your bookmarks in a new sidebar
  • Add gadgets to access your favorite sites more easily
Toolbar Labs is currently available for Internet Explorer only.
A few weeks ago, Google joked about creating a special version of Google Chrome which show web in 3D. Well Google introduce O3D, all joking aside now, a new, shader-based, low-level graphics API for creating interactive 3D applications in a web browser. Most content on the web today is in 2D, but a lot of information is more fun and useful in 3D which is enabling users to create and interact with 3D content

What is O3D?
O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser.This API allows for the development of sophisticated 3D applications that rival experiences one would expect in native applications. Technology like this will eventually make launching high quality games as easy as clicking a link in your browser.




Read more about O3D on the Google Code site explore the API.

On Monday, the company showed off a technology that, for a subset of images it's found on the Web, can identify similar photos. The technology works by "computing the visual distance" between two images then finding the nearest neighbors in the image database, said Radhika Malpani, the Google director of engineering who presides over image search work.

Google added a number of interesting features to Google Image search lately, including the ability to filter pictures by style and color. Now, this new Google Labs project can also find similar images. New feature should make it easier to find just the right image for you.



So for example you need to search for "Paris" so it will show on images which having the Meta tag "Paris" here you will able to see images for beautiful city of Paris and also able to see images for celebrity Paris Hilton. Now you only need to see the images for City of Paris so just click to the link below the photo you like, which says " Similar Images". After doing this you will able to see the similar set of images for your choice of image. and it works perfectly. It also means that you can find other images also, for example if you search for "Ice Age" then in "similar images" result you can find the all cartoon characters of the movie

works great ! !

Google is also working on a more sophisticated understanding though, for example through face recognition in Picasa Web Albums.
Google introduce new Timeline feature. It presents Google News results chronologically in a timeline view that organizes many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can zoom in and out, or navigate through the timeline by dragging. Users also can choose to display the most important stories about a topic by adjusting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades & it is also easy to restrict searches by the type of source, including blogs, newspapers, news photos, and Wikipedia.

Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources like Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos which play right in the timeline interface. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search. You can also add Blog Search results & some of searches for blogs also included a number of results from public twitter profiles & Freebase and other the type of content, including books, music, movies, tv shows, video games, and even artists.

Google having its own domain for labs now Googlelabs.com which is hosted on Google App Engine.

searching for "Breaking News" in "Blogs" showing only CNN.com news ! !
"Inserting images" New Lab Feature from Gmail,which enables user to insert images into the email. To get the job done first of all user need to enable this feature from Lab tab. After that go to compose email. Make sure you're in rich formatting mode, or it won't show up. Click the little image icon, now you can able to insert images in two ways:


By uploading image files from your computer or Insert the Link of the Image.

Note also that many email programs (including Gmail) block external images by default making all that hard work in vain. It's a default to protect you from spammers so user need to change the setting according to the email programs. In case of Gmail, User need to click "Display images below" or "Always display images from ..." to see images you embed.


There's a new feature in Gmail Labs called "Sender Time Zone" that can help. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see green phone icons next to people who are probably awake and readily reachable. The default time is 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender's local time zone and if you see red phone icon next to those who could be sleeping or out of the office:



Click "show details" and you can see when a message was sent in the sender's time zone as well as what time it is for them now. By this feature user can able to communicate to others with a accurate timings who living in different time zone. Its a must have Lab feature for Gmail users who communicate with others across the glob.