YouTube, Picasa, Flickr Previews Now in Gmail

Another feature from Gmail Labs sees Google eliminate those annoying links from the end of your emails. I send a lot of emails and like most, a decent amount of them are links and forwards for YouTube or funny little tidbits I find online.

Announced via the Gmail blog by resident software engineer Vishal Kasera, the company has added YouTube, Picasa and Flickr previews to emails. The addition of previews is pretty cool because it means no more messy links to those NSFW videos I sometimes send to people for the laugh. That aside, Kasera is singing the benefits for Flickr and Picasa but I can’t honestly say I actively use either -- so I probably won’t see many previews for either in my emails. To enable Previews in Gmail, hit Settings and then Labs. You might have to poke around for a bit, but it’s in there. On a separate note, when will they start alphabetizing the Labs features?

The Gmail team announced Labs a while back as a way for the team to float ideas to users. Basically, the Gmail engineers make all the applications they like and they go to Labs for users to try out. The ones that stick are made permanent. We’ve seen some great features (and some not so great) and it seems there’s no end to the team's great ideas. What do you guys think of Previews, which pile will it belong to?

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