There’s more than one way to get feedback on your software development, and Google’s pretty much going to try them all. The search giant is inviting users to try new features that might be added to its Gmail service.

At 6 p.m. PDT Thursday, users will be able to select from 13 new features in a “labs” tab in the Gmail settings page.

“The idea is you can do whatever you want, get it out to tens of millions of people, and get feedback,” Gmail product manager Keith Coleman said.

What’ll the company do with all that feedback? Popular features will be incorporated into Gmail.

Among the new features on the horizon:

• Superstars, which lets people select custom stars to label mail.
• The “e-mail addict” tool that lets people lock themselves out of their e-mail account for 15 minutes.
• A fixed-width font option to view a message within a font whose characters are the same width — handy for some formatting challenges.
• Mouse gestures that let users take actions based on mouse movements.
• Custom keyboard shortcuts.
• Signature changes that let people automatically add a signature file above quoted text in an e-mail reply.
• “Muzzle,” which conserves buddy-list screen space by hiding status message
• A quick-link tool that lets people bookmark specific Gmail messages.

Tags: development, e-mail, features, feedback, Google, Software