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Google Calendar Gets Labs Of Its Own

Gmail has had Gmail Labs for a while now. Gmail Labs are a great place to try out experimental Gmail features if you are so inclined. The mad scientists who are Google's engineers have cooked up an entirely new set of Labs, this time for the Google Calendar.

Google says it has been pleased with the response its Labs has seen in Gmail. There are tons of features in Gmail Labs for users to test out. I have quite a handful activated that have become essential to my Gmail experience.

With respect to new products, Google says it attempts to find some balance between what's useful and what's going to have a large impact. David Marmaros, Software Engineer, explains, "A feature may be useful to only a small handful of people, but to those folks it might be incredibly important. This is especially the case with some of our enterprise customers who are looking for ways to extend Calendar in highly specialized ways that would apply only to their employees."

Google's answer? It has brought the Labs idea to Google Calendar.

Just as with Gmail, when you open Google Calendar, you'll see the Labs under the settings menu. This is where Google will place experimental features for Calendar from now on.

At launch, Google is offering six different Labs to try out. Google shares details on a few of them:

Next Meeting: This Lab shows users how much time they have to procrastinate.

Free or Busy: Allows users to see which of their friends or coworkers are currently in meetings.

World Clock: This will let users keep track of different timezones when they schedule meetings.

Others include the ability to change the background image of the calendar, attach Google Docs, and jump to a specific date in the calendar.

Google welcomes any and all feedback, so feel free to try out the Labs and let Google know what you think.

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