Google continues to trim down its product line as part of the company’s new “focus”. The Internet giant announced that it is closing down some more of them, and some functionalities of others. Google Wave. You may have already thought …

As frequent travelers, folks with bad ISPs, and laptop lovers can agree, it’s not always easy to connect to the Internet, and being cut off from the world is a real nuisance.  But now Google’s solving one aspect of the problem by making Gmail accessible to people who are offline.

Google announced that they have expanded the Google Gears Geolocation API to include WiFi compatibility. Previously, it was only available for mobile phones. It is set up so that applications using the API can find WiFi networks within 200m.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe spoke with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on stage at the TechCrunch 50 Conference, and two really interesting nuggets cam

In the days of dialup, accessing the Internet was a nuisance.  Now, not so much.  Still, users of Gmail and Google Calendar should be pleased to hear that the programs may support offline use in about six weeks’ time.

Windows Mobile users won’t have to worry about applications being unavailable while they are flying or otherwise away from a wireless connection.

Back in October, we shared news that Google Calendar was requesting permission to use Google Gears to provide offline access. We’re still waiting on that.

Now it appears Google Blogoscoped is seeing something similar with Google Docs.

Release 2.0 of gOS, the Green Operating System some people call a Google OS, has been released as a free download.

PC World has a list of the 25 most innovative products of 2007. While most of them are actual gadgets—the iPhone, the Kindle, and various other pieces of hardware—many of them are web apps. Among the most interesting picks:

1. Google Gears—heralded as a step toward the browser as a desktop

9. Facebook API—duh.

17. Zoho Notebook—compiles all kinds of information and enables you to share it

In the first week of June Google launched a program called "Google Gears" that expands the already impressive capabilities of Google Reader (Google’s free news reader) to allow offline viewing. Here is a quote from Google’s related blog posting:

A little probing into offline application-enabler Google Gears finds that the prospective Gears developer could be in for a little code-shock.

Here’s Bret Taylor on my new video camera talking about Google’s Gears. He manages developer products at Google and we have a seven minute conversation about Google Gear, the new developer API that lets Web developers build offline applications.

Why did I put this up on Blip.tv? Because I used my new Sanyo Xacti video camera and am experimenting. This is a little shaky, sorry about that.

Google announced an open source browser extension that enables web applications to run offline.