The developments seem to be related.  On the Official Google Blog, Chris Prince explains that Gears’s name was changed "to better reflect the open nature of this project."  He continues, "We want to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing."

 Slightly Outdated Gears Site

Which leads us to MySpace’s implementation.  People not in the habit of deleting messages have often accumulated hundreds, if not thousands, of notes from friends, random bands, and money-seeking females.  Clicking from page to page was an inefficient way of looking at everything.

A fresh statement reveals, "[U]sers can now type in any keywords related to the message (sender name, subject, content, dates, etc.) and the results show up in real time, as the user types."  The opt-in upgrade’s quite nifty.

As for the future, Gears isn’t letting up on the "open" and "time-saving" themes; support for Firefox 3, Safari, and Opera is coming.

Gears availability for Google Docs seemed like a logical extension for the productivity applications Google provides, but getting it in place took some time. That time arrived.

Though not as attention getting as the Virgin and Google to Mars news, or as fictional, the Docs with Gears move provides more ammunition to the Google versus Microsoft battle. Even though Internet access via wireless connections seems ubiquitous, there are places like airplanes where Microsoft Office and similar desktop software have an advantage.

Offline access for Google Docs began a controlled rollout, as disclosed on the Google Docs blog. English language-only support arrived first, with a promise for additional supported languages in the future.

This offline access is limited in scope within Google Docs as well. Only word processing received initial support for editing or writing documents. There is no offline access to spreadsheets or presentations yet.

The utility of having documents keep in sync makes Google Docs much more useful. Once reconnected after offline work, all of the editing goes right back into the computing cloud, saved on Google’s servers.

Since Google tends to update products on a rolling basis every two to three months, we’re going to guess offline spreadsheet support via Gears will rollout this summer.

According to Andy Beal, Google’s calendar application is talking to Google Gears, which specializes in offline functionality.  “I just saw an interesting pop-up message while opening-up Google Calendar,” Beal wrote.  “It said the application wanted to use Google Gears, did I approve?”  Beal did.

But despite that promising start, it turns out the feature still isn’t functional, and Beal’s pop-up isn’t even appearing for most users.  There’s no doubt that this is real, though – others have echoed Beal’s report, and he took a screenshot as proof – and it looks like whatever Google has up its sleeve is much nearer to the company’s hand than its shoulder.

All of this raises an interesting question: if Google Calendar becomes available offline, what else might follow?  The smart money’s on Gmail – even if taking it offline would be considerably more difficult, this represents a sort of logical next step, and is also something that would please a lot of users.

For the time being, though, we’re just waiting to see if Google Calendar can catch up with its paper counterparts.

Google has a weakness when it comes to keeping new products a secret. According to Garett Rogers, Google uses volunteers to do much of its foreign translation–they provide them when a sentence or two and the volunteers provide the translation. While Google gets all of their translation needs fullfilled for less than minimum-wage, it can make it hard to keep new products a secret.

Rogers first provided us with a screenshot that suggests a new interface for Gmail might be forthcoming.

Next, Rogers did some additional digging and found more translation screenshots that suggest one of Gmail’s new features will be the much-desired “offline” capability.

Note: Google Gears is the tool that currently allows you to view your RSS Feeds offline.

Other new features include account use logging–so you can confirm who used your account and when.

As a Google Apps user, I’m glad to see Google might soon offer an offline version of Gmail. It’s interesting to note that this comes just days after Yahoo announced their acquisition of Zimbra and Mozilla revealed their plans for Thunderbird. It seems Google becomes highly motivated whenever there’s news from a competitor’s product.

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As described by Bill Kee, Google’s Associate Product Marketing Manager, this blog will function pretty much as you’d expect; it’s “where we’ll keep you up to date on latest from the Gmail team,” he states.

It just occurred to me that we haven’t seen any fresh Gmail developments in a while; perhaps Kee has something specific in mind.

“We’ll post feature updates, productivity tips, and some insights into the people and the technology behind Gmail,” he continues.  “And since Gmail works even better with Google Calendar and Docs & Spreadsheets, you’ll find posts from folks on these teams as well.”

I should inform you that, at the moment, you won’t find posts from anyone – Kee’s message is the only one that’s been published.  That’ll change, though, and Kee writes, “[W]e look forward to sharing some of the fun and crazy things we’re up to around the office.”

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a soon-to-come announcement and upgrade (whatever it might be), and that’s a likely scenario.  The last post on the Google Gears API Blog dates to June 11, however, so – just to be safe – don’t hold your breath.

Google has been extremely active in the last year adding services and developing products for users and webmasters alike, however, in some instances they have missed the mark.

Here are some of the news, new and improved products from Google:

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"Now, you can read these updates whether you’re on or offline. It’s easy to read today’s financial news from the New York Times on the train, or catch up on your favorite blog while on a plane 35,000 ft. above the Atlantic.

Once you’ve installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they’re available even when you don’t have an Internet connection."

I can’t believe I missed this piece of news. I am an avid user of this program but I have always found it sad that I couldn’t use it without an Internet connection… now we all can. Great work Google!!

What is Google Gears?

Google Gears is a new open source browser extension that allows developers to create web applications that also extend to offline use. Gears provides three key features according to the Google Gears FAQ:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Above that description the details are beyond me but more information is available here. It definitely sounds like a very useful initiative.

PS. they note within the blog post that because this is a developer release there are likely to be some bugs in the short term.

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It’s a bare-bones, three-part architecture in Google Gears. Blogger Dare Obsanjo looked behind the curtain and found Gears wanting with respect to data synchronization:

What happens if I’m on my laptop and I go offline in Google Reader and mark a bunch of stuff as read then unsubscribe from a few feeds I no longer find interesting.

The next day when I get to work, I go online on my desktop, read some new items and subscribe to some new feeds. Later that day, I go online with my laptop. Now the state on my laptop is inconsistent from that on the Web server. How do we reconcile these differences?

A data sync would reconcile those, and Google’s developers provided some suggestions on accomplishing it. Obsanjo found Google’s approach lacking for web application developers who aren’t Googlers already:

It seems that without providing data synchronization out of the box, Google Gears leaves the most difficult and cumbersome aspect of building a disconnected Web app up to application developers.

“Google has tossed a database API at us and called online/offline synchronization solved,” James Robertson said in agreeing with Obsanjo’s point.

It’s probably instructive that online/offline data syncing tends to be the sort of service that requires payment for commercial software that can do it. Perhaps that’s a market for a clever developer: build a Google Gears sync and charge a nominal fee for it.

TechMeme seems to penalize bloggers who link to other bloggers. Most bloggers believe that a major part of how TechMeme decides which is the most important story is to count links. That isn’t true in following mine, and other people’s results.

I believe there’s a “linking penalty” on TechMeme. At least it seems that way after doing my own link counting.

Let’s say there’s three stories.

Story A links to B and C.

Story B only links to A.

Story C doesn’t link to anyone.

Who will be most popular at TechMeme? Often times “C” will be. But shouldn’t “A” be? Since that’s the one that has the most inbound AND outbound links?

In my experience it won’t be and that often C, who didn’t link, or get linked to, will often be the top pick.

Why is that? Because I think Gabe wrote an anti-gaming algorithm which looks for bloggers linking to each other. I believe his algorithms are penalizing bloggers who often link to each other.

Here, look here at the story about Google Gears on TechMeme.

There are currently five articles that are showing up as headlines on TechMeme (this was the order that they appeared at time of writing — being higher is better).

1. By Artur Bergman on O’Reilly Radar. (His article doesn’t link out to other bloggers who covered this story).

2. By Nick Gonzalez on TechCrunch. (Nick links to me).

3. By Martin LaMonica at CNET. (His article doesn’t link out to other bloggers who covered this story).

4. By me. (I link to both Artur and Nick’s articles).

5. By David Berlind at ZDNet. (His article doesn’t link out to other bloggers who covered this story).

Now, how many blogs are linking to each?

Artur has three links, according to Google’s Blog Search at the time I wrote this article. (No outbound links).

Nick has five links. (Nick links to me as his only outbound blog link).

Martin’s has zero links. (No outbound links to other bloggers).

My blog has eight links. (The most links!!! and I link out to two other bloggers, so most inbound and most outbound links).

David Berlind has no links. (No outbound links to other bloggers).

So, lesson learned. If you wanna be the top dog on TechMeme, don’t link to anyone else but get them to link to you.

Or, is something else going on? I’m sure Gabe will say that most of the eight people who linked to me don’t count to his algorithm because he only looks at what the seed bloggers (folks who’ve been hand picked to be counted) are linking to. That might be true, but I’ve looked at enough result sets now to start a theory that there’s something else other than a straight counting of links going on.

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Setup its suite of office applications to go offline. Oh, and everyone else’s too.

Zojo? ConceptShare? Zimbra?

All will be able to go offline soon if their developers adopt Google’s Gears.

UPDATE: David Berlind at ZDNet has the best insight I’ve seen posted so far about Gears and has a podcast/interview with Linus Upson, director of engineering at Google

Right now I’m using my computer while not connected to the Internet. I’m typing in Windows Live Writer’s window and I’m surfing Google Reader while unconnected.

Some things that work better? Google Reader doesn’t hesitate or “stutter” every 20 posts like it does when it’s online. Some things that don’t work as well? It doesn’t download images so posts have grey boxes in them.

I just reconnected and it instantly shared all the items I had maked as shared.

Nice implementation and works simply and easily. I’ll definitely be using this on my next plane ride.

I wish it ALWAYS worked in offline mode, though. Why do I need to click a button to resubscribe? The Gears team told me this is a choice the developer will need to make.

Oh, while offline, if I reloaded my browser, or accidentally closed it, it goes back to my Reader automatically. That’s nice.

Look for more offline applications to come from Google soon. They don’t have any to announce yet, but said they are working on their Docs and Spreadsheets.

What really just happened? The Web got a little further away from Microsoft’s platforms and Google revealed a little more about its platform dreams.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to developing an app using Gears?

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