As more and more organizations (and individuals) contemplate moving to web-based applications, one of the big hesitations was that the applications (and your associated data) were stored on-line, “in the cloud.”

That’s perfectly fine if you’re at a stationary location, with a reliable internet connection, but it pretty much rendered online applications useless on airplanes, away from hotspots, at the beach… Anywhere without a connection.

Some time back, Google started working with a technology they called “Gears.”

Gears works in the background, synchronizing your online data with a local copy on your computer’s hard drive (almost) transparently. Lose your internet connection, and no problem – You’re working with a local copy that gets re-synchronized with Google the next time you’re connected.

As of this writing, Google has incorporated Gears into its Reader, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentation products, but it’s been noticeably missing from their Gmail and Calendar applications.

However, that may be about to change.

The rumor over at the ReadWriteWeb Blog is that Gears functionality will be added to Gmail and Google Calendar within weeks. If that turns-out to be true, I may (finally) be ready to “move to the cloud” entirely.

If you’re interested in learning more about Gears, here’s the support link.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.