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Recently, Google launched the Gmail Labs application, a new tab on the Gmail Settings page that offers a selection of experimental Gmail features for users to evaluate. In the end, the most popular ones are to be implemented in Google’s core products.

Within the Gmail lab are 13 features, from Signature Tweaks, a change in the way your signature appears at the end of messages, to Email Addict, an expanded way to mark messages to a setting that lets you block Gmail and Chat for 15 minutes so you can walk away and have a life.

The one called Superstars provides users with a set of customizable icons that can be used for the differentiated marking of messages, depending on their subject, nature or sender. The yellow star is alone no more, as colored stars, exclamation points and question marks have been added to the list of options.

Another notable feature is Quick Links, a sort of Smart Folder idea that allows users to easily navigate to any bookmarkable area of Gmail. Clicking in a label and performing a search, for example, will generate a unique (though fairly human-readable) URL that can be saved in this Quick Link area.

Each project or new feature is listed with an explanation and the ability to toggle it on and off. A couple features conflict with each other and they include warnings to that effect, but there do not appear to be any checks in place to prevent enabling them together.

There are certainly other interesting features in this initial batch, such as Pictures In Chat, Fixed Width Font, Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, Mouse Gestures, Random Signature, Custom Date Formats, Muzzle and Hide Unread Counts. Each feature contains a "send feedback" link that brings users to a special Google Groups area for this new Gmail Labs experiment. There’s no guarantee that these features will remain in their current form or officially make it into Gmail.

Keith Coleman, Gmail product manager, said that the company is trying to be the opposite of uncoordinated companies that take months or years to get anything done. "We want to build basically the model of a 100 million user startup," he said, "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."