Google Adds Gadgetry To Gmail

I actually stumbled across the new gadgets in Gmail yesterday inside my Gmail settings, not by reading the Official Gmail Blog.

[from Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Calendar and Docs gadgets by Dan Pupius]

[…] we’ve worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail.

There’s a third Lab that allows you to add any gadget by pasting in the URL of its XML spec file (e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml).

[…]

This is also a chance for us to test the developer infrastructure involved. We’re using common gadget infrastructure, such as the Apache Shindig project, and working with other gadget containers to make gadgets more portable.

I immediately added the calendar and docs gadgets into Gmail, and they are great. I have already used the porthole to Gcal ten times, I think.

While the post from Pupius states that they are not only thinking about extensions for Gmail as add-ons in the left margin, they seem pretty stuck in that. I continue to wonder why they can’t add tasks to Gmail and/or Gcal, consider what an awesome job Remember The Milk has done.

I am happy that they are fooling with Shindig, but functionality first, please.

Come on guys, get with it.