I Want To Be Excited About Gmail Labs, But…Well….

Google has officially launched Gmail labs, a testing area of Gmail features.

The good news: despite a TechCrunch report suggesting that Gmail Labs was georetarded to the United States and United Kingdom, I’m seeing labs here in Australia.

Gmail labs offers a variety of optional extras, including layout tweaks, shortcuts and even a game titled “Old Snakey.” Taken alone it’s a traditional Google Labs style offering: throw some things up, get some feedback, run with the popular ones as standard eventually, and I have no issues about the model what so ever. But..well…it’s just not exciting. Nothing in Gmail Labs is a radical change from what Google is offering on Gmail now and all the options are window dressings, nothing more. And of course they still haven’t enabled drag and drop, the one feature that would further turn Gmail into a killer business/ enterprise mail app.

My recommendation: don’t spend more that 5 minutes playing with this. Gmail Labs is accessible via the Settings Menu within Gmail.