Content Matters

I'm a big fan of the ASP model and try to minimize the installation of software wherever I can. 

However, there are times when I just cannot or prefer not to be connected.  I get frustrated on an airplane, when I can't type in my contact notes because Salesforce.com made "no software" their logo and mantra.  I take a commuter train each morning and have to write blog posts offline in Word, then copy them into TypePad when I'm connected.  I use an offline RSS reader to read posts on the train, even though I'd prefer the navigation of online-only reader Netvibes.

Google has taken note of this and has just announced Google Gears at its Developer Day event.  Google Gears is an open source development environment designed to run both online and offline.  Gears is driven by javascript APIs which support data storage, application cacheing and multi-threading technologies.  Google hopes that this plugin can become a standard for offline applications.

As part of the launch, Google has added Gears offline capabilities to its Google feed reader.  It will soon Gear-enable its office applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Calendar.

With Google, it's hard to anticipate whether they will put a serious push behind their new offerings, particularly those outside of its core advertising platform.  If they put a big push behind Gears and it gets takeup in the open source community, it could have a significant impact.

For more on Google Developer Day, take a look at http://code.google.com/events/developerday/
For more on Google Gears, see these posts from TechCrunch, O'Reilly Radar and Robert Scoble.