Gearing up for something more useful

So, Gears (formerly known as Google Gears) is a year old. I trialed using this offline-enabling application as a way to keep up with my Google Reader RSS feeds when on the move without web access and as backup for on some of the flakier days for internet access.

I used it for the first month, but what prevented me from keeping it up was the lack of integration with other products. Despite the plethora of social bookmarking services and Google Reader’s sharing functionality, I still use delicious. I’m so used to its design and functionality that although other pretenders may come along with more functionality, it acts as a hard drive extension for my brain!

The problem was that I’d read a post of interest, but wasn’t able to bookmark it to delicious as that is not offline-enabled. The result was an awkward process of keeping the post unread and going back to bookmark later when web access was restored.

Now that Gears is focused on spreading its open source technology to other services hopefully that will change and I may start using it again. For now, though Gears remains ‘offline’…

Update: delicious offline access may indeed be coming through Yahoo’s BrowserPlus branded as desktop capability for web applications…