One of the great things about technology is that it helps bring the world together in terms of travel and, more especially, communication. Whether you’re traveling or keeping in touch with friends or coworkers in another country, Gmail now offers tools to help track the time in their area.

Sender time zone works by popping a little phone icon next to the sender’s name in an email. It only works after someone has emailed you, but the icon is green during the fairly standard office hours of 9 am and 6 pm and then turns red.

Obviously these hours are most useful for understanding when a cohort will be at the office, but you can also click ’show details’ to get even more information. The details will list the current time and what time the email was sent- both in the sender’s time zone.

Whenever you send an email, it automatically includes your current time and time zone settings. Sender time zones turns this tiny bit of information into a useful tool.

This can be a really helpful tool while you’re traveling to stay in sync with friends and family without having to convert back to your home time zone all the time. You can also use it to know when it might be too late to call a colleague overseas.

As businesses and their workforces become increasingly global, it can be quite difficult to keep track of the time zones in Asia, Europe and the West all at the same time. Forgetting to check the local time of a friend can result in embarrassing and obnoxious gaffes like waking them up in the middle of the night.

This tool seems especially suited to business users that are most concerned with a quick view of whether they’re going to call or email during business hours. It would be nice to see the feature address personal users by allowing you to change the green hours to include the evening or icons that denote morning, evening and night.

Either way, it’s fascinating to see the Google Labs team can still find a way to innovate using email headers, which have been standardized for decades.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 10:12 am under Google.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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