A Google Summer

Google surprises again in this first week after Memorial Day. If you have not been paying attention or maybe are getting into the nice weather we have been having towards the end of May, Google has updates Google Maps with Street Views. Nothing really new since Microsoft has had this in Live for about a year now. The difference is that the Google Street Views actually works nicely, is intuitive, and does it all in all browsers.

I toured San Francisco and in the new Google Maps Street Views and I am totally impressed! It is really an immersive 3-D experience. Wow is all I can say.

And then there is Google Gears! This one is just as impressive. It is an offline web application framework that works in all web browsers and platforms since is based on Javascript and a local SQLite database. I installed it on my MacBook and on Windows XP in Firefox and had no issues at all. Google has made Google Reader a Gears enabled application and it works just as advertised offline. Cool stuff.

Now, they just need to get GMail, Docs and Spreadsheets working in a similar transparent fashion. If Google Reader is any indication of what the near future brings, then 2007 will turn out to be quite an innovative year for Google. The real killer is that Google Gears is released as open-source under a BSD style license.

I think Microsoft is going to be in trouble and losing ground on the web front. I plan to see how Google Gears works out for enabling custom web applications to enable offline browsing capabilities. Time will tell how successful Google Gears becomes.