Firefox's wildfire

After months of waiting and minutes of technical hurdles, Mozilla finally released Firefox 3, its open-source browser challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer crown.

While faster performance and better memory handling are sigificant Firefox 3 improvements, the real star is its Smart Location Bar, better known as the "awesome bar," which lets users type real words rather than sometimes-abstruse URL addresses to call up Web sites.

Other features of Firefox include a prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware; offline data access, a feature that can make Web applications usable, even when the network is unavailable; a better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser; and a star button to quickly add bookmarks. (Read the in-depth review by CNET's Robert Vamosi here.)

The foundation was aiming to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox's release, and, after site issues delayed the release for nearly an hour, Mozilla said more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

It's likely, however, that the majority of those who downloaded Firefox 3 at this stage will just use it to replace Firefox 2, not a competitor such as Microsoft's still-dominant Internet Explorer or Apple's third-place Safari.

As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox--the heir to the Netscape legacy--that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.

Yahoo bleeding executives
A Delaware court denied a fast-track schedule to hold a trial on whether to invalidate Yahoo's controversial employee severance.

The shareholders had sought to have a trial on the severance plans, prior to Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting on August 1, at which time investor activist Carl Icahn is currently planning to run a dissident slate to unseat Yahoo's entire board. The pension funds were concerned that unless the severance plans were invalidated, a successful election by Icahn would set off the first of two triggers needed to activate the plans.

If Microsoft was holding out any hope of enlisting Icahn to its side of the table with a partial acquisition of the search pioneer's business, Icahn apparently isn't budging. Icahn, as quoted in a Reuters report, said he believed Yahoo's advertising partnership with Google "might have some merit."

Icahn, in the interview, declined to comment on whether he would continue with his proxy fight to unseat Yahoo's entire board with his own slate of dissident directors, or scale it back and seek only a minority representation on Yahoo's board.

Having failed to buy all of Yahoo, or even its search business, Microsoft is now looking to take an even more piecemeal approach: hire Yahoo's workers. The company took out an ad in the San Jose Mercury News touting the fact that it has search jobs available in Silicon Valley.

Think the Microhoo drama is starting to grate on Yahooers? It seems that top executives are voicing their angst with their feet.

Since we learned last week that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network division and leader of many of the company's core products, plans to leave the company, there has been a steady stream of top executives jumping ship.

Weiner, who is joining venture capital firms Accel Partnerse and Greylock Partners as "executive in residence," was joined in the executive exodus early in the week by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of the photo-sharing site Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in 2005. Fake's last day with Yahoo was June 13, and Butterfield's will be July 12.

After this news had a couple of days to settle on the Yahoo campus in Mountain View, Calif., three more executives announced plans to leave the company: Qi Lu, executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology; Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications; and Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of search.

Other recent defections from Yahoo include Usama Fayyad, chief data officer, and Jeremy Zawodny, a top programmer and advocate of what's now become the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Making the broadband connection
Sprint Nextel plans to launch its first commercial WiMax service in Baltimore in September, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said during a speech at the Nxtcomm trade show in Las Vegas. Sprint will turn up WiMax service in two other cities, Chicago and Washington, before the end of the year, Hesse added. But he didn't give a specific time frame for these deployments.

The much-anticipated WiMax service has been delayed several times. Initially, the company had said it would launch the service in the first half of the year. More recently, it has been vague about when it would deploy the service. It's been testing the mobile WiMax service with download speeds of between 2 megabits per second and 4Mbps since the end of last year in Chicago and the Washington-Baltimore area.

Verizon Communications is also looking toward big cities as the next big opportunity for its Fios broadband and TV service. The company said it expects to get approval from the New York Public Service Commission to offer its Fios video service in New York as early as next month.

The company sees cities as a huge opportunity for the Fios service, which provides high-speed Internet service, telephony, and cable TV service over a super-fast fiber connection. Because most customers in big cities such as New York live in large apartment buildings, Verizon has had to adapt its installation process.

Verizon is also boosting speeds for Fios. As part of the upgrade, all Fios customers will now have access to download speeds of 50 megabits per second and uploads of 20Mbps for about $140 a month.

Meanwhile, a group of investors has agreed to take over Philadelphia's Wi-Fi network just as EarthLink was set to pull the plug on it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the group plans to change the business model. Instead of charging $20 a month for network access, the group will offer free Wi-Fi based on advertisements.

EarthLink announced on June 10 that it was abandoning the project after being unable to find a buyer for the network, 80 percent of which is complete. It also claimed that after months of negotiations with the city and a nonprofit group interested in running the network, it was unable to close the deal.

Also of note
Hewlett-Packard announced a significant reorganization of its most profitable division, paring five groups down to three within the printing-and-imaging division. ..A Missouri woman accused of contributing to a teenager's suicide by creating a fake MySpace account to taunt the girl pleaded not guilty in federal court...The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is expected to support the $5 billion merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio...Google is developing a suite of tools to help broadband users identify traffic discrimination by their Internet service providers.

Google plugs in

Silicon Valley came to Washington this week to talk about plug-in hybrids at a great conference organized by Google.org with Brookings. The combination of tech visionaries, electric cars on display, Washington heavy hitters such as John Dingell, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and even a couple of film stars, Peter Horton and Anne Sexton of Who Killed the Electric Car?, made for a great meeting.

Here are my notes from the standing room only event ...

Strong keynotes from Dan Reicher of Google, who laid out Google's road map for work on plug-in hybrids and renewable energy, Peter Darbee, the CEO of PG&E who gave an information packed speech on the role of the power industry as energy producer, Jim Woolsey, who pulled no punches on the Saudis and the Wahabi philosophy as it pertains to our need to achieve energy independence, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-S.C.), who pointed out that government should watch out for unintended consequences of its policy as in the impact on food prices due to support for ethanol, and Chairman John Dingell, who, noting that the auto industry is the only industry that now regulates low carbon, told his friends in other industries, "We're coming to get you next."

The conference was full of optimism, as it should have been, but PHEV pioneer Prof. Andy Frank reminded everyone that the oil industry is not going away any time soon and may have different ideas about the future of the electric car.

Shai Agassi gave his usual awesome presentation on Project Better Place, which is moving full speed ahead in Israel and Denmark with its zero-zero approach to no gas costs through a pure electric car and a free car with a contract. Other interesting speakers included Alan Madian, who laid out a road map for emissions reductions that was pessimistic, only because it assumes very slow turnover of cars.

Jack Hidary and Jim Woolsey asked why the U.S. can't stimulate the retirement of older, gas guzzling vehicles as other countries do, and Jack pointed out this would also help the beleaguered U.S. auto industry.

I had a chance to try out Tesla, Chairman Elon Musk's personal roadster. Tesla delivered its first production models last month. Controls are a bit close, though ergonomically sleek ... the body features a good bit of light-weight carbon fibre but still smokes the coolness test. Moving around the floor of the conference, the car was utterly quiet. The range of 240 miles is impressive -- enough to travel from New York to Washington one-way or from San Francisco to San Jose and back -- though I would like to see about a hundred more miles to facilitate vacation trips -- fill in the blanks on where you like to go.

Everyone seemed proud of the Detroit-engineered Chevy Volt, due to go into production in 2010. The concept model is sharp. If only they would put it into production it would be the sharpest car on the road. Using a serial hybrid system -- electric and then gas in series, it will make trips under 40 miles gas-free but allow longer ranges using gas. But to remind everyone of the past, Peter Horton and Chelsea Sexton, stars of Who Killed the Electric Car?, were on hand.

The bottom line is that electric cars are coming. The question is how many people will buy them and whether the infrastructure will be ready. In this regard, Shai Agassi and Project Better Place's concept of building out networks of plugs and battery charging stations in Israel and Denmark seems particularly promising. A few speakers pointed out that many people live in apartments and may have trouble charging electric cars if they park on the street.

Regarding the deeper question of the power that will ultimately run them, while electricity is currently about one-fifth the cost of gas, important questions remain about the power industry's ability to produce the necessary power, clean or not. If people want to charge up during the day, hundreds of new, probably coal-fired power plants may be needed. On the other hand, if they charge up at night, today's capacity may be sufficient. To prompt the latter, time-of-use pricing is a necessary requirement and it is a very open question

Whether today's balkanized power industry can make the changes necessary to supply sufficient clean power is an open question. On the other hand, if America wants to do something, it can.

Ultimately it will come down to how seriously we want to make this happen.

Google modernizes Web software tool

Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.

"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.

App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.

Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.

GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.

"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."

GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.

Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.

Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.

GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.

It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

A Few Google Tips

In my last post, I talked a little bit about QuickBase’s non-typical Google Analytics implementation. During my time spent investigating how to properly implement the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code) on our site, I learned a few nifty things that I thought I’d share.
Make Tracking Dynamic Url’s Pretty

If your site does something like append a session ID to a page url, your probably seeing clicks to the same page look like clicks to different urls with the data showing up in Google like:

/page.php?sessionid=A2DB4BHe554ERG5
/page.php?sessionid=RG4577H891HH677
/page.php?sessionid=345J10R5BM56TH5

In reality, you want visitor data for page.php rolled up into just “page.php” and you probably don’t want to see the sessionid (or whatever dynamic data you have appended to the url).

Fixing this is pretty easy. In your GATC, you’re probably making a call that looks like this:

1



pageTracker._trackPageview();

If you use the default GATC, like in the example above, Google will look at whatever the url is and go with that. In other words, pages with dynamic data appended will continue to look like different urls.

The solution is a rather easy one:

1



pageTracker._trackPageview("page.php");

That’s pretty much it. Just feed in the string you want Google to call this page. You can tell Google to call the page whatever you want, even if the page was actually called page.php!

You can read more on this here.
Track Outbound Link Clicks

Google can track any clicks on outbound links you may have on your site, even if that site doesn’t have the GATC installed. This may come in useful if you’re purposefully driving traffic to a third-party for whatever reason. Here’s how you do it:

First, you need to turn on the feature. To do this, you need to add _setAllowLinker(true) to the default GATC implementation like so:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9





Once you’ve made that modification, you can add some javascript to your outbound link and start getting the click data.

1




Notice that you can specify how you want the click data to look in Google. If you follow the methodology used in this example, all of your outbound links will look like they were clicked from a folder on your domain called “outgoing”. This makes finding outbound click data much easier if you’ve got a lot of them.

Here’s the Google support page on this topic.
Keep Your Data Private

In April, Google launched a new data sharing policy at around the same time they updated the GATC with several new features. If you’re like us, you want to keep your site data private. Here’s how to do it:

* Login to your Google Analytics Account and select the account you wish to modify from the drop-down in the upper right
* In the upper-left, click on “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings”
* Selected your desired Data Sharing Settings and hit “Save Changes”

Of course, you don’t have to keep your data completely locked down.

Here are the options:

Share with Google Products only - For example, you would allow this if you wanted to share analytics data with Adwords (for use with Google’s Conversion Optimizer perhaps)

Anonymously Share with Google products and the benchmarking service
With this option enabled, Google will remove any identifiable information from your analytics information and use it for benchmarking and to improve upon its existing products/services.

Do Not Share will disallow Google from using your analytics data internally and it will disallow you from using the data within other Google products and services.

Hope you find these tips useful!

Microsoft Aims to School Google Collegiate Apps

Microsoft adds Exchange Labs e-mail to its Live@edu solution in an effort to keep pace with Google in online apps.

With Google Apps Education Edition gaining market traction in thousands of universities across the country, Microsoft can ill afford to rest on its lofty on-premises software laurels.

The software giant, looking to make inroads against Google Apps in the SAAS(software as a service) market, May 27 said it is providing its Microsoft Exchange Labs hosted e-mail applications free for university students and alumni.

Microsoft Exchange Labs is now part of Live@edu, a Microsoft R&D communications and collaboration project based on Microsoft Exchange Server.

An alternative to the education editions of Google Apps and Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail service, Microsoft Live@edu includes Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft Office Live Workspace and Windows Live SkyDrive online storage, which lets users share documents and photos.

Students can use these tools to communicate with each other and teachers through e-mail and instant messaging. Students also can use Live@edu to complete coursework solo or to collaborate on group projects using the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office Live Workspace.

Since Live@edu launched in March 2005, 2,000 universities and colleges in 86 countries have enrolled in the program. These include UNINOVE, a large university in Brazil that boasts more than 70,000 students, and Kagoshima University in Japan, which deployed Live@edu for its 16,000 users.

Google claims millions of students and faculty at more than 6,000 universities are using Google Apps.

Students Demand Alternatives

With Exchange Labs in the Live@edu mix, universities will be able to provide students with hosted e-mail with up to 10GB inboxes and 20MB attachments, Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for Microsoft's Live @edu software, told eWEEK. Students can now also access their e-mail, contacts and calendar from Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as from mobile phones with Exchange Labs.

Gabrielle said Microsoft launched Live@edu after a buildup of student demands for alternatives to proprietary e-mail systems, or even as an alternative to Microsoft's Exchange-driven Outlook system.

Microsoft used Hotmail in some cases to solve the problem, but for students using mobile phones all the time, a more comprehensive suite of communication and collaboration software was necessary.

Other features of the service include shared calendars (with Exchange Labs, users cannot see Google's free/busy calendar, but can send and receive meeting invites from Google Calendar); student directories that enable administrative control to create distribution lists; and the ability to add faculty and staff who are using on-premises Exchange to student directories.

Security is of paramount importance at any institution, so Live@edu with Exchange Labs also allows message tracking to confirm that e-mails were delivered and includes content filtering so that admins can quash e-mails with offensive content.

Hotmail Alternative by 2010

Exchange Labs comes as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are locked in a titanic battle for the education e-mail sector, Gartner analyst Matt Cain said in a research note.

"Exchange is a richer platform than Hotmail, [so] it represents a more competitive offering than the Google platform," Cain wrote. "The ... Exchange Labs option also allows Microsoft to test new Exchange features and functionality at high volumes, and is designed to perform better in a hosted environment than the current version of Exchange (Exchange 2007, SP1)."

Cain said he expects Exchange Labs will replace Hotmail at universities by 2010 and noted that the advantages of running Exchange Labs rather than Gmail for students (while running Exchange on premises) include a common global address list that makes address look up easier and a consistent end-user and IT staff experience.

Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

Vic Gundotra, head of developer evangelism and open-source projects at Google

(Credit: Google)

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies about where the brains of the computing operation reside. In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through "dumb terminals" that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these "clients" prospered. Now it's the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.

"We are going to make the cloud more accessible. And we're going to make the browser more capable," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software.

Clouds and clients and connections, oh my

Google isn't showing its Google I/O cards beforehand, but here's my translation of Gundotra's opening keynote themes--"Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud"--into some specific projects under way at Google. For client, think Google Gears for running Web applications even when offline. For cloud, think Google App Engine, a site to house Web applications. And for connectivity, think Android, the mobile phone software package.


The Android software itself is under development at Google, with help from a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance. To make that project successful--in particular its promise as an open foundation with a vibrant programming community--there needs to be software for Android, too.

Google has been trying to jump-start the Android developer program. It launched a developer contest that drew 1,788 submissions. I'm guessing Google will announce the winner from the top 50 finalists (and click here for a PDF of the top 50 Android apps in slideware form).

A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime

(Credit: Google)

More newsworthy, though, is the likelihood of a second software development kit (SDK) for Android. "We are working on those things in the next day or so," Gundotra said of the SDK last week. "Android is a big portion of how we make pervasive connectivity useful."

Google vs. Microsoft

We in the media are doubtless too susceptible to narratives that pit one company against another, but in Google's case, there really is a big rivalry with Microsoft. The search giant is trying to make into reality the fear Microsoft had in the 1990s about Netscape, that the Web browser would supplant the operating system as the way people used their computers.

Gundotra has seen it from both sides. Before joining Google in 2007, he was general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, the culmination of a 15-year stint at the company.

But does Google want to dominate the Web platform the way Microsoft has with the operating system platform? Emphatically not, said Gundotra, who took pains to note that the I/O in Google I/O stands for "innovation in the open."

"Today, the most interesting and dominant platform is not the closed, proprietary platforms of the past, but the open Web...It's the platform adopted by all of us because it isn't controlled by any of us," Gundotra said. "Google's motivation is to move the Internet forward as fast as we can."

That's not to say Google isn't interested in bringing home the bacon. But its Web platform work has only an indirect connection to Google's revenue and profits.

Gundotra repeated what's become a familiar refrain to me as I've asked various Google executives about how their initiatives make money: "We have an economic reason to move (the Web) forward. As it gets richer, better apps, it gets more users. More users using more apps leads to more Google searches, and that leads to more revenue for us," he said.

Android is another target aimed at Microsoft. It will become freely available open-source software--or at least 8.6 million of its 11 million lines of code will be--with the specific intent of providing an alternative to Microsoft's mobile version of Windows. Wind River Systems wants to profit from it directly by helping phone companies build it into their products, but Google thus far has voiced no such ambition.

Lighting a fire under Web 2.0


App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.

But developers are likely to be disappointed in hearing about one area in which they're hungry for news: support for other programming languages besides Python in App Engine. Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl support are the top four requests in the App Engine issue tracker, and JavaScript, C#, and ColdFusion Markup Language are in the top 25.

"You can assume from that ranking what we're working on, but not what we'll announce next week," Gundotra said. And he wouldn't offer a specific time frame. "We're actively working on it. It's difficult for us to know until development gets further along."

The company is pleased with the progress so far. It's granted App Engine access to 60,000 developers so far, said Tom Stocky, director of product management for developer products.

Gundotra promises that App Engine isn't a lock-in strategy to lure application developers irreversibly to Google's part of the cloud.

"It is hosting the same open LAMP stack people are used to," he said, referring to the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server software, MySQL database software, and Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages to run Web applications themselves. "If you decide you don't want to use it, you could easily revert back to using your own data center."

Well, maybe not easily. App Engine ties into the Google-only BigTable service for housing data. But the company is working on an export ability for data, and there's an open-source implementation of BigTable, Stocky said.

Giving Gears

The company claims to be equally giving with Google Gears, an open-source project that Google released in beta version to enable richer Internet applications. Specifically, it lets browsers store data better in a local database, work offline, synchronize once they're online again, and run JavaScript more efficiently.

It's hard to find Google Gears used beyond Google Docs, Zoho's competing online office applications, and Google Reader. Gundotra is happy to declare the project a success in another way, though: its influence on version 5 of HTML. Indeed, a draft of the HTML 5 specification includes interfaces for handling database storage and offline work.


"You're right on the cusp of seeing a slew of apps come out that use the HTML 5 and Gears features that redefine what a Web app can do," Gundotra said. "We're working to drive that innovation, and also to drive that back into standards...We think we contributed to the evolution of the Web."

Google Launches Gmail Labs

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is inviting Gmail users to participate in the testing of new features for the free messaging service.

On Thursday evening, the company introduced Gmail Labs, a new tab on the Gmail Settings page that offers a selection of experimental Gmail features for users to evaluate. Late Thursday or Friday morning, Google expects to post an announcement about Gmail Labs on the Official Gmail Blog.

At a press event Thursday afternoon at Google's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, Gmail product manager Keith Coleman described the opening of Google Labs as "a big change in the way we do product development here."

Coleman said that Google has a variety of ways to assess user interest in new features for Gmail. Ideas bubble up internally, they get suggested by users, and publications occasionally publish feature wish lists.

Gmail Labs was born out of the desire to get more features to users faster. Google did something similar last October when it launched Google Enterprise Labs to hasten the availability of search innovations for Google's business customers.

In the past, Gmail's new features have been launched internally at Google, where they might be tested for weeks or months before being made publicly available.

"But we actually want to take the next step and let Gmail users help us with that refinement," said Coleman.

Given the extent to which Google relies on measuring user input and interaction to fine-tune its applications, actively soliciting user input to improve Gmail appears to make sense. Having leveraged the wisdom of the crowd to make its search results more relevant, the company sees potential value in the criticism and enthusiasm of the crowd.

As of Thursday evening, Gmail users will have access to new features that have been evaluated only for code stability, not for user interface coherence or product viability.

"There are actually some things in here that we think are bad ideas," Coleman admitted.

But the point is not what Google thinks; it's what users think. The popular features will eventually become part of Gmail. The not-so-popular features won't.

Some of the experimental features will break. Coleman said that when that happens, the hope is that users will click on the feedback link associated with flaky feature, which will take the user to a Google Groups discussion with the engineer responsible. "There's a direct connection with the people who are designing these things," he said.

The initial crop of experimental Gmail features includes: Quick Links, which lets Gmail users bookmark any page view in Gmail; Superstars, which provides a variety of colored stars with graphics for flagging messages in a more meaningful way; and Old Snakey, a snake game that runs inside Gmail.

There's also Pictures In Chat, Fixed Width Font, Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, Mouse Gestures, Signature Tweaks, Random Signature, Custom Date Formats, Muzzle, Hide Unread Counts, and Email Addict.

Email Addict, Coleman explained, provides a link at the top of the main Gmail pane that can be used to voluntarily lock oneself out of one's Gmail for 15 minutes, in order to get some real work done.

Coleman said that the Gmail team is looking at the possibility of allowing users to actually develop Gmail features or add-ons, but isn't ready to announce anything.

Google, said Coleman, is trying to be the opposite of lumbering companies that take months or years to get anything done. "We want to build basically the model of a 100 million user startup, where people can do whatever they want, as they would with a nimble startup, but can actually have the reach of a large popular product like Gmail," he said.