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