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Sep. 13, 2007

Google recently hosted its annual Google Developer Day (GDD) that took place in ten countries where the company has offices. The event is intended to showcase its Google Gears and the company's various application programing interfaces (API).

The one held in California was moved from Google's Mountain View headquarters to the San Jose Convention Center to accommodate a growing crowd of programmers and developers that rely on Google's API.

Google's Gears initiative is about developing an open standard to help turn the Internet browser into an improved and better-performing programming platform, while enabling applications to work offline when there's an inconsistent, slow or non-existent Internet connection.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google said at the event that one of the main purpose of the GDD is to respond to user feedback in rolling out Google Gears.

Brin added that there had been a growing interest in Google Docs and that users wanted the ability to work with these API tools offline. Fundamentally, it bridges the current gap between the browser and desktop software.

Brin also said "people want access to their data and don't want to have to worry about devices or operating systems, with everything in between."

There were two opposite cases that kept coming up: the developing world and business travelers on airplanes. The ability to access applications such as Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Gmail on an airplane (where there is no Internet connection) will make these tools more useful to enterprise users.

Google Reader is currently available, but these and a few more applications have yet to be rolled out for Google Gears.

The availability of these Google applications offline address one barrier to adoption by business users in particular. Contrary to what some industry observers had initially believed, they won't take market share away from Microsoft Office any time soon.

In fact, a small segment of Internet users may find Gears-enabled Google Apps to be a reasonable alternative in certain specific cases.

Brin added that Google's initiative wasn't just about access to applications but also their performance and responsiveness. He said "we started to fix the browser with Google Gears but there are still other problems to be solved at this point."

Developing countries with limited, slow or unreliable Internet access will be able to use Google Apps, or any third party applications built on Google Gears.

Other Google representatives at the table made the point that this was less about Google than creating a richer browser development platform for others.

In that sense this is a logical extension of what the company already started by releasing its Google Maps API to the world.

With Google Maps and Mashups, the search giant built a real developer community. There is a very different feeling from the event.

There was Google, as a true Web services and browser-based software company, self-consciously trying to extend the momentum and excitement it had generated with its Maps and other Google APIs into entirely new realms.

Representatives said that Google would benefit ultimately, albeit indirectly, through third-party creativity and applications that they expect to come out of Gears. Google Mapplets is an example of that.

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Source: Search Engine Land