Google yesterday unvieled a new technology that would help shape Web 3.0. In the times when Adobe and Microsoft are fighting to build the latest web delievery platform in the form of Flash/ Flex/ Apollo and Silverlight, Google has touched the area which no one could have imagined.


As per Google, Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

Store and serve application resources locally
Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness


Wow! Now thats what one should call innovation. Flash/Silverlight went to the extent of only providing a means of delivering rich content, whereas Google intends to provide a Web Server to the client's platform.

Its availability for IE/Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux... and in development versions for Mac Safari are definitely worth noting.

Another important factor is that Google has open sourced the project. It means that the growth of the framework would be exponential. The power of Javascript and the client browser has been leveraged best by Google in its previous products such as GMail and Maps, and now Google gears to take it further.

The examples on the website are quite exciting. They open the doors to a road that has never been travelled. Infact, Google has just integrated Gears with Reader. So now you can read your past 2000 items without even logging in or getting connected to the internet. Wow! What would happen when Google integrates it with GMail. We would have an application like Outlook running from internet, and storing our previous mails, and sending the new ones... as soon as it gets connected.

The opportunity for the applications built on top of Google Gears seems enormous. It is innovation Google style.