Google has added a “labs” tab to its Calendar service, which should, as with the other labs options, offer users a chance to try out new functionality before it’s ready for mainstream introduction.
Nice to have another Labs button to keep track of 
As explained in a post to the Google Apps blog, the approach that tends to result in the highest success rate for those new features added is to offer them under a “labs” tab in settings and simply let users play with them, see which see most widespread adoption and then run with those. Indeed, we recently saw a number of features “graduated” from Gmail’s labs, which others were “retired,” due either to lack of use or lack of adoption on a large enough scale to be worth adding.
The new features added to the Google Calendar through labs, for people as into calendar applications as I am, allow you to change the background image, bringing the Google Calendar experience much closer to that of Gmail. Similarly, you can attach a document to an event, see a world clock, indicating what the time is for the people you’re scheduling a meeting with, a “jump to date” option for faster navigation, a “next meeting” option that just shows how long is left before your next meeting. There’s also a handy “free or busy” option to show if your friends are doing anything (which could prove very handy indeed).
If nothing else, it’s nice to see that there are more features being added to Google’s calendar, which has basically remained almost entirely unchanged for the past three or four years. The fact that there’s a labs tab available means that users will be able to at least try out some new features without having to install custom Firefox extensions (which has been one of very few options for a while now).
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