On Tuesday, Google announced another new product, Google Gears (of course, only in early Beta version). Gears is Google's new framework for developing applications that will work offline. They're making it an entirely open-source thing, as well as giving a detailed API sometime in the near future, so expect this thing to go far.

I have not tried it yet, but the architecture sounds interesting. Apparently the Google Gears system installs a lightweight web server, an SQLite database system, and a system for synchronizing between the local and Internet servers. It sounds similar to Adobe's Apollo that I talked about a couple months ago, but possibly even more open-source and extensible.

The first Google application that supports this is one of my favorites, Google Reader. Especially if I had a laptop, I'd love to read some of my feeds while on my train ride home (although I might just do that on an iPhone instead). I hope to see this take off with Gmail and other services so that I can write an e-mail offline, hit Send, and it will just go the next time I connect to the net. That'd be a big step toward the Google operating system (not the Facebook operating system - which brand of evil OS would you like better?).