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Thursday, May 31, 2007 |
Google announced an open source browser extension that enables web applications to run offline.
Editor's Note: The release of Google Gears represents another way to shift offline focus to one's online applications. Google Reader is the first to receive this treatment; which web apps, in or out of Google, would you like to have available at 35,000 feet? Discuss it with us at WebProNews.
Google wrapped up its Developer Day in Sydney, Australia, with a handful of announcements. One of them will help make its many applications available to people who are temporarily without a web connection, like business travelers.
"Unfortunately, today's web browsers lack some fundamental building blocks necessary to make offline web applications a reality," Google's Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson said in their post on the new Google Gears blog.
"In other words, we found we needed to add a few new gears to the web machinery before we could get our apps to run offline," they said of Google Gears. "It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline."
The browser extension will work with any Gears-enabled application. Though Google is working with Adobe, as well as browser makers Mozilla and Opera, Gears sounds like a project that will compete with Adobe Apollo.
Three core modules for Gears have been released: LocalServer, Database, and WorkerPool. "Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps," said Boodman and Arvidsson.
One of the first projects for Google Gears is a new version of the Google Reader for RSS feeds. The comapny's Chris Wetherell talked about that on the Google Reader blog:
Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.
We gave the offline reader option a try on one of our machines, and noticed one immediate improvement the offline experience has over the online one. It's a heck of a lot faster in performance working with those 2,000 items locally, rather than waiting for Reader to churn through the next 60 items in the Boing Boing feed.
Google Gears only grabbed the text from the feeds, though. No images or videos offline. That certainly helps the download speed in getting feeds into the Gears database, but in the case of feeds like Boing Boing's it really kills the more interesting parts of many of their posts.
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StumbleUpon Stumbles Into eBay For $75 Million
By David Utter
Staff Writer | WebProNews
The heavily-rumored acquisition of social sharing site StumbleUpon by eBay finally came to fruition, with eBay shelling out "an aggregate transaction value of approximately $75 million" for the site.
Both TechCrunch and GigaOM predicted yesterday the StumbleUpon purchase would be completed, and were proved correct.
eBay announced it would pick up StumbleUpon for about $75 million. StumbleUpon originated in Canada, and provided a browser toolbar that allows users to click a button and find sites within their selected areas of interest.
Those sites would be ones tagged by other StumbleUpon users, and each user can vote sites up or down when they appear in a Stumble. The simple yet effective concept caught on quickly, and the company moved to California to be closer to the action in Silicon Valley.
StumbleUpon claims a userbase of 2.3 million. They recently launched a video product called StumbleVideo, which focuses on video results. Michael Buhr, a senior director at eBay, will become StumbleUpon's general manager. As one of StumbleUpon's happy users, I'm hoping eBay won't turn the product into a non-stop lovefest of auctions appearing in the Stumbles.
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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To SEO or Not to SEO?
I have heard horror stories (ok really just some bad experiences not so
much horror) about SEO firms (large and small) and not getting results
that are expected (realistic or unrealistic). So if you have a
significant "size" network of websites, is it worth bringing this in house?
In our case, we own a network of review sites (everything from software to online dating) with about 40 categories (8-10 reviews per) currently which will grow to 100 categories by the end of the year. It is all unique content and we have an in house writer that simply writes articles to add to the review content. From my limited SEO experience, this should be a gimme for an SEO company or person.
So the question is, do we roll the dice on a contract with an SEO company or seek out a full time person to bring in house. I know results of any sort are 2-4 months away and significant results can be 6-9 months.
I would like to hear any thoughts from anybody or any company that has done either side of this equation.
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Inc. 2549 Richmond Rd. Lexington KY, 40509
