Ask HN: Is it true that Google cut the 20% time for personal projects?

"I don't work for Google but it is so important to know it"

is similar to

"Which one of the top actresses would I want to go to bed more".

The crude but seemingly valid answer to both is: if it was really relevant to you, you would know anyway :)

No, not as far as I'm aware (I just launched a 20% project).

Note that 20% time should be used on something that could benefit the company in some way. Open sourcing a library = good use of 20% time. Building a model trainset = not good use of 20% time.

Here's a recent blog post from the official Google blog that mentions a cool use of 20% time: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/robot-hackathon-c...

My experience at Google was that 20% time worked on the honor system. I'm not aware of anybody trying to measure it, nor do I know how you would. That said, I think most people, most of the time did not take 20% time, so the real amount of time spent was probably much less than 20% averaged across the company anyway.

Does anyone know if non-googlers can work on Gmail apps/plug ins? I have some cool ideas that would benefit a lot of people in their daily email writing.