No Internet, no problem? Enter Google Gears.

A few weeks ago, my always forward looking co-writer Jake waxed upon the relative advantages and disadvantages of web email vs. his trusty Apple Mail.app.  He hoped that Microsoft’s early moves into integrating the two would be followed by similar offerings from our favorite web giant–Google.

Not surprisingly, Google answered today with something it has no doubt been working on for some time: Google Gears.  Simply put, Google Gears offers third-party developers a way to create programs that allow the off-line use of websites.  It accomplishes this using a simple browser plugin (less than a megabyte) that offers developers’ three APIs with which to interact with the web.  It is open source, cross-browser, as well as cross platform.  For more technical details, check out the TechCrunch coverage as well as Scoble, who was at the press event.  See also the Gears website.

An example “Gear” is already up that enables off-line functionality in the beautiful Google Reader, which is many a power feed-follower’s client of choice.  It puts a little arrow in the top-right corner of the page.  When you click the icon, Reader begins to download the 2000 most recent messages for use off-line.  When connect again, everything syncs up–messages that have been marked read, tags, etc.  It works great, especially for such an early release.  Tomorrow, as I begin a road trip to New Orleans, I know that I’ll be happy to burn through the morning’s posts, which I’ll sync before I get in the car.

One can only imagine the possibilities.  The most obvious, following in Jake’s footsteps, is a Gear for Gmail.  This would fix my one remaining problem with the application.  If I could sync Gmail off-line, I would return to it with open arms and a big smile as my email client of choice.  The security this un-connected access would offer is just too big to ignore, especially as some businesses (and certainly business-people) embrace Google Apps as mission-critical software.

There is another environment that addresses this need called Dojo Offline Toolkit.  I would hope that Gears and Dojo would be integrated, as they seem to address the same space and there is no way Dojo can compete with the kind of muscle Google can put behind its offering.  As far as I can tell, Gears will work on any web-app developers to which developers decide to apply it, not just Google’s suite.

This is a big day for the future of a web that should be useful if one is connected to it or not.  Internet access will only spread, but users still have those times they are unable to access its services, most notably on planes.  Those unable to afford EVDO cards can add cars and trains, as well as your average coffee shop, to that list.  There is still something about web apps that I love, and I will be glad to be able to return to their world unfettered by the unease of disconnection that I used to fear. 

-Alex Rosen

A Rumor a Day Keeps the Apple Away

On May 16th at around noon Engadget, one of the hottest Tech blogs, released an exclusive Apple internal memo announcing 5 month delays for both the iPhone and the latest version of Apple’s operating system, Leopard. Within minutes, the following happened to Apple’s stock:

$4 BILLION dropped off AAPL’s market cap immediately as investors hurried to beat the impending sell-off. The stock dipped 2.3% at volumes of over 2 million shares traded in just a few minutes. Just another night on the Street right? Not exactly, you see there is a slight problem with this tiny tumble: the announcement was falsified.

Disgruntled Apple employee? Microsoft saboteur? Jack Bauer? An AAPL investor who sold his shares last summer for $50? Who knows? Someone hacked Apple’s internal memo system and someone else (a “reliable” source, claims Engadget) sent it straight over to Engadget. It was Christmas/Chanukah for some investors who were able to buy into the stock at the discounted price of 103.42 (it closed earlier that day at 107.34). Meanwhile, many others took part in a $4 billion tumble.

Four hundred years ago in England, a substantial canal system helped the country become the world’s earliest industrial economy. Information and therefore capital could travel cross-country faster than in any other place in the world. Today, the speed of information and capital is as fast as the human ability to make and vocalize decisions. This has provided the developed world with a level of productivity that could never have been imagined just one century ago, not to mention four. Along with this improvement in speed has come a vast expansion in the diversity of media, moving from letters sealed with a wax emblem and carried by hand to emails, voicemails, faxes, and blogs with virtual signatures carried over fiber-optic cable that would have proven most useful half a millennium ago tied to a cleat.

The Apple memo was retracted within two hours, but the damage had already been done. The speed with which information travels and large scale capital transactions are made is staggering, but the recent demonstration of the power of the blog is even more so. The reaction shows that Engadget is as much a world-mover as CNN or ABC ever were, and combined with the latest M&A activity in the online ad market giving much the same indication, traditional media giants better watch out. Online news sources have a vast and confident readership that have one characteristic that differentiates them from the TV, Newspaper, and Radio audiences: they are more specialized than ever. It would be a rare thing for a non-tech geek (or what we call in the business: n00bs) to peruse Engadget.com on a daily basis, and sure, their readership might not reach the millions of viewers CNN and ABC receives every night, the Engadget.com nerd community is much more likely to turn that information into some kind of use-value. The entire technology industry eyes Engadget.com closely, and while the information is limited in range, its depth is unparalleled in the traditional media.

What will this mean for the media world in general? An shift of this magnitude in an industry that sinks its tentacles into every aspect of life, business and personal, will have dramatic consequences for the near future. Are websites like Engadget.com the end of this sprint towards media diversification? Or will we see a new revolution join the ranks of bloggers who have marched forward incessantly in the past few years? Who knows, maybe Twitter is the next Vogue. Journalism is changing, and with it, the world.

Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Oh My!

My preferred mail client is mail.app. Call me crazy, but I don’t like having to use the browser every time I want to see my mail, and while backing the mail up to mail.app every once in a while might be enough for some people, I enjoy having offline access to my mail all the time. Alex, my  partner-in-blog, exclusively uses Gmail. Each of us have been trying for months to get the other to switch, but with no success. Still, we look forward to the day when an email product will arrive that smoothly syncs an offline mail client with an online one (mostly because our frequent arguments make us look incredibly nerdy in front of our not-so-technologically-inclined friends).

All that being said, it is Microsoft that first approached the smoothness we seek. The following is from the Windows Live Hotmail press release of May 6:

“• Outlook Connector…will enable people to view and manage their Windows Live Hotmail account from Outlook for free, with full contact, e-mail and e-mail folder synchronization.
• Mobile: Using Windows Live Hotmail for mobile…customers can access their e-mail when they are on the go on a Web-enabled mobile phone or PDA. In the future, Windows Mobile® customers will receive a richer online and offline Windows Live Hotmail experience with Windows Live for Windows Mobile, which will ship with Windows Mobile v6.”

Any Gmail user must admit that if I had just quoted a Google press release, they would be fairly excited. I know that Alex and I would be, at least. Even if this isn’t a threat to the supremacy of Gmail, as the Web Worker Daily article claims (and many other articles like it written in the past few days), mustn’t this necessarily change the way we think about email? Even if Gmail continues to dominate the online mail sector, this kind of change must force a reaction from Google. This, at least, is what one would hope.

Competition breeds innovation, which breeds further competition, which breeds further innovation and so on. Capitalism. The last thing we want is for one email provider to monopolize the field, which would necessarily result in a reduction of the impetus for innovation. But do these principles apply in the world of Web 2.0 and beyond? Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry by vertically integrating the modes of production in the oil industry. Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, MTV, CMT, VH1, and Dreamworks, provides a good example of a horizontally integrated coroporation. But what do you call Google’s recent purchases of YouTube.com and DoubleClick? What is the industry relationship between these two companies other than they are on the internet and add to Google’s massive and amorphous depth. Take a look at the google apps website to get a sense of what I am talking about:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

In the Web x.0 of the future, what is the relationship between competition and innovation? The dynamics of web integration are not straightforward, and it is probable that the legal parameters of this integration are even less so. It will be interesting to see if U.S. antitrust laws have what it takes to go up against a company with an enormous amount of power that doesn’t even require its users to pay. In the meantime, I’ll be rooting for the underdog.

Digg Incident: In People v. State, who wins?

The recent incident on Digg, when the staff preemptively took down some posts that gave and linked to the HD DVD cracking code, is well known by now. For quick background, check out Wired’s early coverage, the EFF’s excellent legal primer, and of course the now infamous Kevin Rose post on Digg’s blog informing the community that Digg would not continue to take down posts containing ‘the number.’Details are still a little vague on whether Digg actually got official take down notices, or whether they were just following advice from their legal team, though the latter seems more likely. Although it angers them, the geek community around circumventing DRM schemes and intellectual property rights online seems to have accepted that websites need to comply with the law, even when they don’t agree with it. The state, simply put, is still Weberian and controls the means of physical force. It still has the power. Or does it?

Digg’s decision to keep the numbers up heralds a decisive recognition of user power over what amounts to real force online–patronage. We have been hearing about the power of the group and the wonderful nature of socially generated media for years now, but this look like the first time that it has been put to this kind of test against the power of the government (or is it the company?). (I am probably wrong about this and there are many earlier examples to choose from, but I’m new at this and this particularly case has been getting a lot of media attention.) Digg’s decision (Kevin Rose even posted the numbers himself) has the subtext that a Digg user revolt (as we saw) is a more powerful threat than legal threats.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Digg in the long run on this. The MPAA and AACS realize that there is no way they can prevent the spread of this number. It is everywhere: blog posts, photos on flickr (that evil search engine bots can’t read), and music videos on YouTube (ditto). But Digg was the most high profile offender, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the industry chose them as a their target. It would certainly be high profile, as Digg started the social news revolution, and is populated by a fiercely loyal community (though not one that would sit back and watch as the site did something they didn’t like).

But all in all, the threat from its users was more immediate. Lawsuits take ages to play out and Digg can probably reach some sort of deal, so they will at least be able to stay up while this all plays out. In contrast, if it had done what it had been doing (taking down posts and banning users) they were going to be shut down with days (or hours).

The users have the power in this one, at least for now. But if history is any guide, the industry will retaliate. Everyone is certainly worried about this eventuality, including Wikipedia admins. But if a state can’t protect its citizens’ intellectual property, is it still the same kind of state? Are we moving further into the era of citizen and private corporation mediated laws?

-Alex Rosen

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