Gmail's People Widget Adds More Info About Your Contacts, a New Social Layer

The Gmail team is introducing an interesting new feature that could prove really useful especially for those sending and receiving a lot of emails each day, from a lot of contacts. The new "people widget," which is being rolled out, will display more information and tools to interact with your contacts.

The widget, which will live on the right of the messages, will retrieve info and updates from a variety of places, mostly Google products for now, and display them neatly in the same spot.

"We think it can be helpful to view relevant information in context, which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages," Zohair Hyder, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"The people widget surfaces content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them," Google explained.

"Next to every email message you can now see contextual information about the people in that conversation including recent emails you received from them, relevant Buzz posts, shared documents and calendar events," it added.

The feature is rolling out slowly, so you may not see it yet. When it becomes available, Google will use whatever source it can to build up information about your contacts.

For users who communicate with thousands of people in Gmail, knowing a person's job title, company and so on should prove very, very useful. It's so useful in fact that Google is hardly the first one to think about it.

There are already a couple of browser extensions, the likes of Rapportive and Xobni, that add this functionality, sometimes with more features, to Gmail.

But the widget is also great for regular users and for Google's strategy. With the widget, Gmail becomes a more social place, a hub for activity more than just email. For example, tweets and other status updates could be added, so you'll be able to get a lot more info about your friends inside Gmail, not just the latest emails.