Gmail Labs has been enhancing our inboxes for nearly a year now, and on Wednesday, April 1, Gmail itself turns five. With an estimated base of 150 million users and all the webmail power features and customizability that one could ask for, Google has done quite well with what began as a "20 percent time" project. With the anniversary approaching, Ars Technica spoke with Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager at Google, about how far Gmail has come, the state of Gmail Labs, and that damn "beta" badge.

Gmail, then and now

Jackson has been at Google for five years, spending the last two of those working on Gmail. Despite Gmail's established popularity among "the power users," Jackson said that growth is actually accelerating. In fact, "the majority of usage comes from outside the US," Jackson said, so Google now does simultaneous releases of new Gmail features in all 50 supported languages.

When asked about his favorite milestones during his time at Gmail, Jackson said that Gmail Chat is "one of the biggest features that sticks out in my mind." Jackson is on board with some of the fundamental advantages of having chat built into an e-mail client, including the blurred 21st century line between e-mail and chat, and the recognition that "it is often much faster to reply by chat when you see that the person is online right there in the window."

Not surprisingly, Jackson cited Gmail's recently released video chat feature as another favorite addition. It was a natural evolution for the complete communication service that Gmail has become, and Jackson is particularly proud of the feature's high video quality.

The state of Gmail Labs

Gmail Labs debuted about nine months ago as a way to toss new ideas against a wall of power users to see what sticks. "When Gmail was small," Jackson explained, "it was easy to launch experimental new features all the time. We didn't have to worry about supporting a massive user base." A massive base is exactly what Gmail has now, though, so Jackson's team needed a new way to bring back Gmail's ability to live on the cutting-edge of modern communication. Gmail Labs was the answer.

Gmail Labs launched with 13 features in June 2008. Now the catalog boasts over 40 options that range from useful tweaks like in-message previews of linked YouTube, Picasa, Yelp, and Flickr content, to novelty perks like mail goggles and the game of Snake. "We've added a new feature about every one to two weeks," Jackson said. Gmail Labs is indeed a testing ground—while no experimental options have been cut or promoted into official features yet, Jackson said his team is planning on making some of those changes soon.

Jackson would not comment on whether any Gmail Labs features will face the axe, but he did cite a few that have earned a lot of praise in terms of feedback and sheer install counts. While nothing is set in stone just yet, "some good candidates" for graduation are Offline Gmail, Tasks, Undo Send (the most recent of this bunch), SMS in Chat, Calendar and Docs gadgets, and Pictures in Chat.

Ars readers wanted to know whether there were any plans to open up Gmail Labs in a way that would allow users to write their own features. Unfortunately, there are not, but Jackson reaffirmed that his team listens to ideas from all over, and rapid development with a minimal screening process is encouraged. "We listen to feedback from everywhere, including forum posts, contact forms, and elsewhere," Jackson replied. He also explained that the team's "decision-making process is very organic between the management team and engineers." There is very little screening before introducing Gmail Labs features, though meeting security and performance standards are, of course, a requirement.

That damn beta badge

Even on its fifth birthday, Gmail will still be listed as a beta product. The badge of modern web honor (or shame, depending on who you ask) still sits below the logo, and it has become the subject of both puns and serious criticism in recent years. For better and worse, Google is credited with (or accused of) bringing the term "beta" to the masses. It's hard to browse the Internet today without seeing the term slapped on a vowel-less startup's logo or even some experimental portion of an established product.

Some random (and fairly typical) bouts of downtime notwithstanding, many argue that Gmail is a mature, solid product now, and no longer requires the beta warning. At the least, it's stable enough for Google to begin experimenting with new features, right?

"We have very, very high standards for the product," Jackson explained, "as we do for all Google products. But we are not ready to come out of beta yet. There are a few things that we're working on, and once we meet a couple more of those criteria, we would love to come out of beta."

Gmail, it seems, is in a sort of Google limbo. Jackson said it is obviously stable enough for everyone to use—even stable enough for the business and Enterprise markets that Google is chasing with Google Apps. But the decision to drop Gmail's beta badge hinges on a few internal criteria (or, perhaps more accurately, feature requirements) that his team feels are still lacking.

Jackson would not comment on what these lingering requirements or missing features are, but he did cite a few that have been checked off the list already. A mobile site and POP and IMAP services were all major milestones on the road towards a beta-less Gmail. In the end, Jackson argued that "if the badge were dropped, would anything really change? We'll still launch features at the same rate as we have been, or hopefully even faster."

I got the impression from our conversation that the Gmail team does not lose much sleep worrying over whether Gmail is worthy of a specific version number. Jackson touted a philosophy of rapid feature development and discussed his perception that communication is a constantly evolving landscape, so his team doesn't see the point in ever calling Gmail "finished."

Still, the rest of the web thinks in terms of specific version releases, and the beta badge is used by most others to denote a short period (i.e., not five years) of known instability and lack of polish. In a world of constant 3.1.x.x maintenance and security releases, however, I can see Jackson's point of software "never being finished." For now, users will just have to remember that in Google's world, "beta" has a different definition.

The future of Gmail

Jackson would not comment directly on what's in store for Gmail, though he did leave the possibility of a dedicated iPhone client on the table. From his responses throughout the interview, it sounds like we can expect a generally healthy pace of innovation. Google clearly knows it has an audience of power users who, Jackson said, "are representative of where all users will be in two years." You can expect Labs to be used even more for experimentation and prototyping of new features, and for Gmail itself to keep pushing the boundaries of not only e-mail, but modern communications.