New York — Google’s Gmail just grew up, and will soon celebrate its fifth birthday this week, has announced its e-mail program, which allows people to customize the application with a choice of 43 options, has extended beyond the United States with its Gmail Labs box of quirky functions it launched last year in English, is now available on a global scale to users in 49 different languages. Google says its international users have been asking for the experimental features be available in Gmail Labs.
According to a blog post by Gmail Engineering Manager Pal Takacsi on Monday, the feature will be available in 49 languages. Most Gmail Labs options are translated into all Gmail’s supported languages “except Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu,” Takacsi said.
According to reports appearing on tech news site Electricpig suggest that Google will make a formal announcement on Monday. Nevertheless, the details are sketchy at best, but a Google spokesperson said that the announcement has a “European multilingual angle to it”.
The blog post read as: “This post comes to you from our team in Switzerland, a small country with no fewer than four official languages and many other spoken by people living here.”
“The majority of Gmail users are outside the U.S., so it is no surprise that since we launched Gmail Labs last year, people around the world have been asking for these experimental features in their local languages. As of today, we are making Gmail Labs available internationally,” Takacsi said.
Google originally announced the service on 1 April 2004, and some in the industry thought that the whole thing was an April Fool’s Day hoax. Since then it has grown to become one of the most popular webmail services around.
“You may wonder, since most Gmail features are available in almost every supported language immediately at launch, why Labs has not been,” Google said in the Gmail Blog.
“The fact is that Labs itself is a bit of an experiment — it came out of people’s 20% time, and we were not sure if it would really work. Specifically, we thought there was a chance that everything would just break,” the post stated.
Google has 43 Labs applications and when a user signs on, the application creates a custom version of JavaScript based on how many of the 43 features are in use. Google says there are 8 trillion possible versions of the Gmail JavaScript that a user could receive and with the addition of 49 languages the number climbs to 430 trillion versions.
“It would obviously be a challenge to actually test all of these versions. But we put a lot of effort into building an architecture that supports this type of modularity, and fortunately, it seems to be working pretty well so far. So we figured, why not, what is another 422 trillion permutations?”
Features include undo send, a way of retracting an e-mail up to five seconds after you hit the send button; mail goggles, which makes you solve some math questions before sending a message, to make it harder to send messages while inebriated; and a forgotten attachment reminder, which reminds you to attach a file if you mention one in your message.
“Because Gmail lives on the Internet, in what we call the “cloud,” we are able to innovate quickly and offer users creative, new and useful features on a regular basis,” said Eric Tholome, director of product management at Google.
Google’s decision to offer near-unlimited storage, and a concentration on usability with help from Ajax technology, helped change the web-based email market.
However, it has not been all smooth sailing. A recent outage caused anger among the community, many of whom used their Twitter accounts to complain about the service, branding it “Gfail”.
Ultimately, Gmail Labs offers an interesting experiment in a broader context, too. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other Web sites invariably encounter resistance when releasing updated versions, but Gmail Labs lets only those who are interested in specific new features to try them out. It does not produce the same type of hard data as bucket testing, in which a fraction of the overall users are involuntarily switched to a new site, but it does let Google respond relatively quickly with new features.
Gmail Lab’s new languages are Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
To enable Gmail’s Labs, visit the Labs tab from within the Settings page.
However, remember that all Labs features are early experiments — no design reviews, no product analysis, and not that much testing — so they may occasionally break. If you encounter problems with your account after turning them on, try this escape hatch.
