San Francisco — Your Gmail inbox will soon become more tidy. Over the next few weeks, Google is rolling out a new feature for the world using one of its strong application: Gmail — Amidst the flurry of activity over the weekend, the search engine giant announced on their Gmail blog that they would be rolling out a new “People Widget” that would neatly display contextual information about all of your inbox contacts.
When browsing through a message within Gmail, this novel feature will summarize recent data from contacts included like recent messages, documents shared in Google Docs, upcoming events on Google Calendar and so forth. The Gmail People Widget sounds cool…and will be rolled out in the next couple of weeks.
“The people widget showcases content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them,” explains Google Software Engineer Zohair Hyder in the blog post.
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The widget is stashed away on the right side of the screen, the people widget will display information about contacts, including recent messages, shared documents, calendar events, statuses and, perhaps most striking, photos and chats between you and a contact. Users can use widgets to schedule group meetings and online chats. Besides, users should be able to click an item to interact with the entry.
Moreover, the People Widget helps make it easier to connect with contacts by consolidating multiple Google features, it enhances productivity to have instant access and social network updates linked to the contacts included in a given message, directly next to the Gmail message, according to the company.
Apparently, Google has been constantly updating Gmail with more functionalities and new add-ons, and because it displays your contact’s photo, title, and place of work, the People Widget appears to have some small business appeal too. Finally, users will also have a new quick communication tools, including starting a group chat session or scheduling a group meeting.
Another consolidated feature is phone calls conducted through Google Voice. The widget’s capabilities are similar to an existing Gmail add-on called “Rapportive,” which connects with social media network Facebook.
Furthermore, the Gmail people widget has come late to the party, and lacks the social network tie-ins of Outlook, but it is a step in the right direction, and users that rely on Gmail will probably admire the people widget.
Also, the Gmail people widget will be released globally to Google’s hundreds of millions of dedicated active users, although it is an optional feature that users can turn off in the settings.