Offline Gmail?

 

As Ajax becomes increasingly popular in offline applications, we may be seeing something remarkable in a year’s time, maybe less, with regards to the “service wars” of the most popular search engines today. Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL used to be the dominant e-mail providers until the early 2000. Everyone is relying then on the minimal storage capacity of our e-mail. We practically need to heck our e-mails everyday to prevent our e-mail from filling up. It’s like having a physical mailbox as it has its own capacity. Even though it’s quite inconvenient for most internet users who doesn’t have a 24/7 access, we still lived through it.

Out of the blue, Google came out with the Gmail, the company single handedly shattered the free e-mail tradition when it didn’t just offer 20MB but 1 GB of free storage. We we’re practically blown away by its capacity and scrambled for invites. Even though it was in beta version for more than a year, almost everyone have their own Gmail account. It’s free, it’s big and the idea of exclusiveness was then way cool for those who have from the have not’s (in the geek sense). Yahoo, MSN and other free e-mail services followed suite. Now Yahoo has unlimited storage and MSN went for a little bit conservative1G. Without Google, we may still be on the rut of checking our e-mails from time to time. On the other hand, Microsoft Corporation’s Outlook just sits in all of the office computers. As the most popular office application, outlook is a giant in offline e-mail. The efficient planning of the creation of this program makes it even more user-friendly in every release. Again we go back to the development of Ajax, as millions of developers scramble to create a good Ajax based application; Google is already gaining followers because of their Ajax based services. Even if were not really conscious about it, we somehow feel Google has a more interactive capacity compared to other programs. That’s all because of Ajax. Now, Google is rumored to have set its eyes to the giant. With the release of Google Gears, the free suite that can let you develop your own Ajax based program. People have been thinking that something is also brewing in Google: an offline version of Gmail. It’s going to be just like the Microsoft Corporation’s outlook only that it will have a more familiar feel of the online version. Even though it has been downplayed by Google, it’s not going to be long before something like that will be released. It’s going to be something like this: you download a software client from Google. Just log in to your Gmail account and all the mails in your online version will be update. When you go offline, the documents will stay in your hard drive that you can access even without the internet. It will be utilizing the latest Ajax development of Google. When go back online, everything will be synchronized according to your offline software. When this time comes, Microsoft’s Outlook should rethink of its services as Google brews a giant on its own.