In the plugin's place, there will be a "new and improved" HTML5-based offline option which will replace the former solution, but its exact launch date is still unknown.

However, it's the introduction of HTML5 offline mode that may be the biggest and most important change of them all.

From Plugins to Web Standards

To understand why, you have to first look at how Google handles offline access now, a feature also found in Gmail and Google Calendar in addition to Docs. At the moment, these web apps go offline if and only if you've installed the Google Gears browser plugin. Unfortunately, not all browsers can properly run this plugin. For example, Mac's Snow Leopard OS and Safari 4 web browser introduced some features which were incompatible with Gears on newer Mac computers. Internet Explorer users could never view spreadsheets offline and users of "alternative" browsers, like the Mozilla-based Flock for example, had to jump through hoops to make it work. And Google Gears on the iPhone? Forget about it.

A better solution is HTML5, the next revision to the markup language used to code the web. The benefit to making this switch is obvious: HTML5 is a web standard, not a browser plugin. That means it will be supported across web browsers and operating systems, assuming users have updated to a modern browser instead of continuing to run IE6 (who are you people, anyway?!) It also means that Apple can't kick it off the iPhone and iPad the way they did with Adobe's Flash plugin. In fact, it means that Google doesn't have to worry about Apple's restrictions at all, the way iPhone and iPad application developers do. Google just has to build a mobile-friendly website using standards-based technology. The end result will be an Internet-based document creation tool and editor that can work anywhere, anytime, even when the Internet doesn't.

And that, in a nutshell, is the future of the web. Mobilized applications that behave like desktop apps, available with or without an Internet connection and that work on any device. Even the iPad. We can't wait to try it out.

No word yet on how long, exactly, we'll have to go without offline access in Docs before the HTML5 solution is ready, but Google's hosting a webinar next week to share more. Hopefully, further details will arrive then.

As of today, all Gmail users will now have this feature turned on by default, however those who have never used it before will need to configure it first in order to take advantage of the enhanced functionality.

The Labs section of Gmail is where experimental and in-development programs, add-ons, and extra features are housed, allowing Gmail users to switch them on or off as desired. Offline Gmail was one of those experiments, launched back in January of this year. Using Gears, an open source plug-in technology designed by Google, email messages are downloaded to your local machine when you switch to offline mode. Also, if your internet connection is dropped unexpectedly, offline Gmail is automatically enabled.

In the year in which offline Gmail has been in testing, the company says they received a lot of feedback from users. Some of the requested features have already been implemented, including the ability to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use and the ability to send attachments while offline.

According to the Google blog post, anyone who was already running the Labs version of offline Gmail won't have to make any changes but those who had never turned on the setting will need to do the following:

1. Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the "Offline" tab.
3. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."
4. Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.

But Isn't Google Switching to HTML5?

At first it seems like "graduating" offline Gmail from Labs is step in preparation for next year's launch of Google Chrome OS, the web-based operating system that ditches the desktop, the hard drive, and computer applications for a web browser where everything users access lives online. Because online applications require an internet connection to work, there have been some concerns as to how functional this OS will be in a world that is not yet blanketed in Wi-Fi or 3G. Since Google has made no mention of built-in hardware providing 3G and cellular access as a backup to Wi-Fi, there will be a lot of programs that simply don't work when you go offline... that is, except for the programs that Google develops itself.

The company has already implemented its Gears plug-in on two other products in addition to Gmail: Google Reader and Google Docs. Meanwhile, other companies have also adopted the technology including online office suite Zoho and to-do list app Remember the Milk.

What's odd about this launch of Google Gears into primetime via Gmail is that this seems to conflict a bit with what Google execs announced last month regarding the company's plans for its upcoming operating system, Chrome OS. During the Q&A session at the end of the press event, an audience member asked about Google Gears support to which Google's vice president of product management, Sundar Pichai, replied by saying that Chrome OS will take advantage of HTML5 for local storage. He made no mention of Gears.

HTML5, a proposed revision to HTML, the markup language of the World Wide Web, includes offline storage as one of its many new features. And it's this specification that Google plans to support in the future, not Gears, according to numerous reports.

For example, in a recent article in the L.A. Times, a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites."

Also, Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google told PC Magazine that the company was abandoning its work on Gears 2, the next version of the plug-in, and will be focused on HTML5 instead. "You can almost think of what's in HTML5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2," he said. "That's how we view it." Upson noted, too, that the company would be able to influence the adoption of HTML5 through their web browser, Google Chrome, the foundation of the new Chrome OS. "Now that we're a browser vendor, we can help move HTML5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome," Upson said.

So in other words, the Gears functionality being switched on now in Gmail may not be the same technology used a year from now when Google Chrome OS hits the market. That begs the question: why bother? If Google plans to replace Gears with HTML5 in the near future what's the point of rolling out the soon-to-be abandoned plug-in to all its users now? Will Gears and HTML5 converge somehow or will Google just rip out the plug-in in favor of HTML5's "plug-in-less" technology instead? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Windows Mobile Only and not a lot of GPS

Looking at the list of supported phones, it is noteworthy that very few of them can actually perform location detection via GPS, though the list of phones that can support detection via cell-ID is relatively large. Using cell-phone towers for location detection, however, can be highly inaccurate, especially in less populated areas. Within cities and most suburbs, though, it tends to work reasonably well. On the other hand, given that a lot of users are very concerned about the privacy implications of location-aware software, maybe having a system that is not 100% accurate might just diffuse some of these fears.

Google also announced two partners in the UK that have already implemented the Geolocation API into their products: the UK version of travel site lastminute.com and the social discovery tool rummble.com.

Fire Eagle

It's important to point out that while this product seems similar to Yahoo's FireEagle at first glance, Google's product is really more basic, in that Yahoo not only provides the location API, but also wants to function as a central clearinghouse for location data and data exchange between different application.

Soon to be Ubiquitous

As we have pointed out before, we think that location-aware software is going to be one of the most interesting markets to watch in the near future and as as location-aware devices become more ubiquitous, we will hopefully see a lot of new and innovative services make use of them, as long as developers can assure users that they can mitigate the potential privacy implications of these apps.

WordPress announced last night on the company blog that WordPress.com users have a new blogging option called "Turbo," which uses Google Gears to speed up the service's admin functionality. Just an hour earlier, WP founder Matt Mullenweg indicated that users should look for OAuth support in future versions of the software.

The new WP.com Turbo feature uses Google Gears to download more than 200 files to users' local computers so they can be run without accessing the web. Though many of the most high-profile Gears implementations elsewhere are focused on providing off-line functionality, it's not clear whether that's the case here or if Gears is just being used to speed up blogging. Either way, this is good news. With the new feature, WordPress.com effectively offers what is called a Rich Internet Application (RIA), combining the responsiveness of local actions on the desktop with the connectivity of the web.

RIAs are already shaping up to be a powerful part of the web. Local storage and user interaction with at least some data fleshes out the possibilities offered by the celebrated migration towards web applications.

This is probably only the beginning for WP support of Gears. We wonder whether the WP developer community will build extensions that leverage WP support of Gears, perhaps even incorporating Gears support for mobile devices. Oh, the possibilities are a thrill to consider. The draft version of WordPress.org, scheduled to be released in final form within the next two weeks, already includes support for Gears as well.

OAuth

OAuth is a user authentication protocol that is quickly becoming a standard. It's all about making mashups fast, easy, secure and thus more common. When Google rolled out OAuth support for all its data APIs earlier this week, we said it was only a matter of time until almost every one else did so as well.

WP's Matt Mullenweg said last night that he wants to see OAuth support in WP but wouldn't be able to include it in the next version. Can we expect to see it in the next version then? We certainly hope so.

What might OAuth support in WordPress look like? There are a number of directions it could go. By supporting inbound OAuth authentication, WordPress could do things like allow you to post to your blog through 3rd party applications without giving them your password. It could also allow blog commenters to associate their accounts on other OAuth supporting services with their WP comments, again without giving up their passwords.

For blog publishers to be able to get secure programmatic access to their reader's data from other services would be very exciting. You don't want to give some random blog your Google Accounts password, but imagine if you could see all the comments ever left on that blog by your Gmail contacts - without giving up your password. That would be great.

There are probably far more possibilities than we can imagine, but that's what makes WordPress so exciting. There's a huge world of plug-in developers that extend the service in ways that none of us could imagine. With OAuth support those developers would be able to leverage a whole new class of options based on secure user data. That means WP blogs could tie in programmatically with any of your Google accounts, your Photobucket account or any other service that supports OAuth in one direction or the other. That's exciting to imagine and it sounds like it should be coming soon.

We're excited to see that WordPress isn't just relying on its developer community to keep it fresh and hip with the times. These new core developments will serve as a foundation for those developers to improve even further on the WordPress user experience.

Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards

Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.

Strands Lifestreaming: What They're Doing and Invites for Readers

Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company's wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It's a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review...

See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search. Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results. In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey

Android Is Out For iPhone Blood

Wednesday, at Google's I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year's CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it's clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.

See also: Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?

The Social Networking Arms Race

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google's platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example -- the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.

See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise

Who Are The "Digitally Savvy?"

A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.

See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.