Gmail goes Multi-Lingual

As of Feb 13 2008, the Gmail team has begun rolling out a new version of Gmail that will now be available in 37 languages (& to think I was considered cool coz I could speak 4 languages). This version, available for IE7 and Firefox 2, has an entirely new code base, which allows the team to add new features more rapidly and share components with other Google applications (you will notice that they use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the contact manager can be seen in several Google apps). So if you were using English, you can now change your default language from the Settings menu to take advantage of a bunch of features that have recently launched in the preferred language, including:

* Colored labels
* Group chat
* Rich emoticons
* A new contact manager with a three-pane layout
* A number of smaller features, such as new shortcut keys and the ability to bookmark individual emails with your browser

One tiny side effect of this change is that it may disrupt some third-party Gmail extensions -- unsupported scripts that directly modify Gmail's code. If you don't use them, you don't need to worry about this.

Few of us will still have to wait in queue as the newest version of Gmail is not yet available for Croatian, Icelandic, Hebrew or Arabic, but you can continue using the older version in these languages. The newest version also is not yet available for Google Apps for your domain.

Hurry up Gmail !@#$