Library Web Chic

So I’ve been meaning to take a look at Google Gears for a while because of the buzz it has been getting. In particular I was interest in the fact that you can use it in combination with Google Reader to read your news feeds offline. So I downloaded and tried it out. Frankly, it is so easy to use that I wasn’t sure I was doing things correctly. To make sure I unplugged my wireless router so I KNEW I wouldn’t have connectivity and then went to the Google Reader page. Voila, feeds to read.

Really, getting Google Gears to work with Google Reader is dead easy. But if you want a tutorial, this is the one I like the best because of the great screenshots.

Now that I’ve used Gears with Reader, I can’t help thinking if Gears will get applied to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This would be pretty darn cool because I could work on my laptop on the plane without being connected to the internet. Once I got back to a network connection, everything would sync.

Irregardless of what you think of Google as a company, creating this type of functionality changes the landscape of computing dramatically. It also makes me wonder what exactly the future of desktop computing is going to be. Will we most users have applications as we think of them now that they install or will we me mostly reliant on web-based applications that we can access from our device over the network or operate in a remote mode.

Additionally, Google Gears raises the question of what applications/information should users be able to access offline? Should we create hybrid online/offline versions of our online catalog or databases for users to use? What are the other potential ramifications of the rise of this type of application for libraries?