<<It has been a year since the launch of Google Gears, and we wanted to offer a glimpse into what's changing, and what's ahead.

First of all, to better reflect the open nature of this project, we've decided to rename ourselves. Henceforth, the project will be simply "Gears." We want to make it clear that Gears isn't just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.>>

googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/0 ...

Why not go all the way and call it OpenGears ;)

Gears' birthday is on May 31st ;)

A year already? Wow and still now very well deployed :-S

Best example : allowing to edit documents of Google Docs offline, but not to create them. Yeah...

I thought the best examples are Remember the Milk & Zoho Office. (not a user of any of the two)

I remember 07 2006 had a Google Gears Plugin for Wordpress. Now Wordpress 2.5+Google Gears=Wordpress 2.6 official.

Sorry, please change to 06 2007

Also, Myspace join Google Gears, it should be a special news like Google OpenSocial.

I think offline Myspace mail will be big. Masses of people use that instead of regular email.

Today is Google Sitemaps' birthday (2 years old).
Nobody wrote about that.
Nobody cares about that.
As nobody should care about Gears' birthday.
But that event for Gears generated thousands of comments worldwide.

Life sucks for products that are not highlighted by Google marketing teams...

The quote posted by hebbet (at the top of this page) refers to Google's statement that Gears is not just a Google thing, but a way of "upgrading the web platform".

Is anyone able to put into simple words what Google is saying here? Is there more to Gears than an attempt to smooth over the differences between offline and online working?

I think what they mean by <<Not just a Google thing>> is that it can be used for any site not just Google Reader/Docs. Which is why they say they're <<Upgrading the web platform>> as it can be used across the whole of the Internet

<< Is there more to Gears than an attempt to smooth over the differences between offline and online working? >>

Yes, Gears is not about making web apps work offline, is about having more powerful browsers.

almaer.com/blog/google-gears-u ...
almaer.com/blog/gears-as-a-ble ...

OK, so is the following explanation fair or unfair?

" Gears is a browser plug-in which provides some useful APIs that can be used by Google and others. Looking towards the future, it "will not have exactly the same implementation of HTML 5 as others"[1] but who cares because Gears is auto-updating. If we can get enough apps to depend on Gears, then Gears will become the de-facto web app API and we won't have to worry about pesky standards bodies in the future. "

[1] almaer.com/blog/gears-as-a-ble ...

Maybe I'm totally missing the point, but is there any way in which Gears is fundamentally different from any other web-accessible API (Flash, Java, .NET, YUI, etc)?

Here's a post about Gears vs AIR:
almaer.com/blog/gears-and-air- ...