This morning Google announced that "offline Gmail" is leaving the Gmail Labs testing area and will be implemented as a standard feature for all users. Once enabled, this feature allows you to access your Gmail even when no internet connection is available. You can read and respond to messages, star them or label them just as you would if you were online. When a connection is restored, all the changes you made are synced with Google's servers and any messages in your Outbox are sent out. As of today, all Gmail users will now have this feature turned on by default, however those who have never used it before will need to configure it first in order to take advantage of the enhanced functionality. Sponsor Gears Makes a Public Debut The Labs section of Gmail is where experimental and in-development programs, add-ons, and extra features are housed, allowing Gmail users to switch them on or off as desired. Offline Gmail was one of those experiments, launched back in January of this year. Using Gears , an open source plug-in technology designed by Google, email messages are downloaded to your local machine when you switch to offline mode. Also, if your internet connection is dropped unexpectedly, offline Gmail is automatically enabled. In the year in which offline Gmail has been in testing, the company says they received a lot of feedback from users. Some of the requested features have already been implemented, including the ability to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use and the ability to send attachments while offline . According to the Google blog post , anyone who was already running the Labs version of offline Gmail won't have to make any changes but those who had never turned on the setting will need to do the following: Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail. Click the "Offline" tab. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer." Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there. But Isn't Google Switching to HTML5? At first it seems like "graduating" offline Gmail from Labs is step in preparation for next year's launch of Google Chrome OS , the web-based operating system that ditches the desktop, the hard drive, and computer applications for a web browser where everything users access lives online. Because online applications require an internet connection to work, there have been some concerns as to how functional this OS will be in a world that is not yet blanketed in Wi-Fi or 3G. Since Google has made no mention of built-in hardware providing 3G and cellular access as a backup to Wi-Fi, there will be a lot of programs that simply don't work when you go offline...that is, except for the programs that Google develops itself. The company has already implemented its Gears plug-in on two other products in addition to Gmail: Google Reader and Google Docs . Meanwhile, other companies have also adopted the technology including online office suite Zoho and to-do list app Remember the Milk . What's odd about this launch of Google Gears into primetime via Gmail is that this seems to conflict a bit with what Google execs announced last month regarding the company's plans for its upcoming operating system, Chrome OS. During the Q&A session at the end of the press event , an audience member asked about Google Gears support to which Google's VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai replied by saying that Chrome OS will take advantage of HTML5 for local storage. He made no mention of Gears. HTML5 , a proposed revision to HTML, the markup language of the World Wide Web, includes offline storage as one of its many new features. And it's this specification that Google's plans to support in the future, not Gears, according to numerous reports. For example, in a recent article in the L.A. Times , a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites." Also, Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google told PC Magazine that the company was abandoning its work on Gears 2, the next version of the plug-in, and will be focused on HTML5 instead. "You can almost think of what's in HTML5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2," he said. "That's how we view it." Upson noted, too, that the company would be able to influence the adoption of HTML5 through their web browser, Google Chrome, the foundation of the new Chrome OS. "Now that we're a browser vendor, we can help move HTML5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome," Upson said. So in other words, the Gears functionality being switched on now in Gmail may not be the same technology used a year from now when Google Chrome OS hits the market. That begs the question: why bother? If Google plans to replace Gears with HTML5 in the near future what's the point of rolling out the soon-to-be abandoned plug-in to all its users now? Will Gears and HTML5 converge somehow or will Google just rip out the plug-in in favor of HTML5's "plug-in-less" technology instead? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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Offline Gmail Becomes Standard Feature (But Still Uses Gears?)

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Merrill Lynch: Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $160 Billion...Really?

Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developers Conference earlier this month. One of the unique features of IE9 that Microsoft announced at that time was hardware acceleration for its browser. Thanks to technologies like Direct2D and Direct Write that are available for Windows7, Windows developers can use a computer's graphics card to render websites faster. While Microsoft is still working on this project behind closed doors, however, you can already download a Direct2D-enabled pre-release version of Firefox 3.7 today. Sponsor Beyond JavaScript: Fast Browsers Thanks to Direct2D Ever since the release of Google's Chrome, browser developers have emphasized JavaScript performance. There is still a lot of work left to be done in this area, but developers have also started to investigate other parts of the browser that could benefit from new technologies. According to Firefox developer Bas Schouten , the current implementation of Direct2D in this pre-release version will work best with graphics cards that support DirectX10 and WDDM1.0 drivers. On systems that fulfill these specs, though, users are likely to see significantly better performance on graphics-heavy sites. Sites that mostly render static text or depend on Adobe Flash to display their graphics won't benefit greatly from Direct2D. One benefit of Direct2D that users will notice on most sites, however, is improved font rendering. For the time being, this is just an experiment and it isn't clear if Mozilla will integrate this technology into Firefox 3.7. What is clear, is that Mozilla seems to be ahead of Microsoft and by doing its development out in the open and through open source, Mozilla will be able to rely on its vast developer community to test and enhance these features. What About Google and Apple? Some would argue that the release of Google Chrome started this new race towards faster browsers, and as CNet's Stephen Shankland pointed out earlier today, the Chrome development team is quite aware of Mozilla's efforts and investigating the use of hardware acceleration in Chrome as well. As Shankland also notes, these Direct2D efforts shouldn't be confused with other projects like WebGL or Google's Native Client. Direct2D-enabled browsers will be able to render current pages faster, while these other technologies will require developers to redesign their sites. Currently, a lot of these experiments are mostly focused on Windows. With OpenCL in Snow Leopard , Apple already offers a programming interface for using graphics cards for general-purpose computing. Apple is probably also looking at OpenCL to speed up Safari, though we aren't aware of any projects from Mozilla or Google that are making use of OpenCL at this point. Get it Now If you feel like experimenting with a new browser, you can download an early pre-release of an alpha version of Firefox 3.7 here. While we have tested this browser for a while and didn't see any crashes, it is worth remembering that this version isn't meant to be run in a production environment and that most of your extensions will likely not work. Discuss

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Hardware Acceleration: The Next Frontier in the Browser Wars

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground . In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. Sponsor This is the third in a ReadWriteWeb series looking back at some of the key trends of the past 10 years. We previously covered the online music industry and the democratization of news media . Recommendations Technology Advances Over the past decade the online retail industry has seen great strides in the use of recommendations technology . Amazon has consistently led the field in this, with its sophisticated blend of personalized, social and item recommendations. Many of the retail recommendations in use today rely on implicit user data . These systems typically track user data, which is then analyzed with a set of usually proprietary algorithms. The end result: recommendations for users. Earlier this year we looked into Baynote's recommendation system : "Baynote observes real-time user behavior on a site and looks for implicit, emergent patterns. It uses collective intelligence and an affinity engine to analyze the data. Common behaviors which it tracks include page refers, queries, mouse movement, time spent on a page, peer behavior." Other similar recommendation technologies we've profiled include MyBuys , ATG and richrelevance . Social Media Takes Retail to Blogs, Social Networks As with nearly every other industry, shopping sites have increasingly used social media to promote their wares. According to Shop.org's recent eHoliday Study , 47.1% of retailers surveyed will be increasing their use of social media this holiday season. Specifically, more than half of retailers have "added or improved their Facebook page (60.3%) and Twitter pages (58.7%)" this year. Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) have "added or enhanced blogs and RSS feeds" over the same time period. One result of this has been a big increase in implicit social recommendations data across social networks and blogs. Another trend with ecommerce sites is distributed sales. Anyone can embed an Amazon store into their blog or social network these days. As Kurt Collins of social commerce vendor Cartfly told us in December , this won't replace "end destination e-commerce" - but it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network. Mobile Commerce Arrives, Albeit Slowly... The growth of mobile phones has been a big trend this decade. However, as Sarah Perez wrote in September, mobile commerce in the U.S. market has struggled for momentum. According to data from eMarketer , more than 70 million U.S. mobile phone users will access the internet from their devices this year. Despite this, the m-commerce market remains immature. In an April 2009 survey by RIS News , privacy and security concerns are still at the forefront of both shoppers' and retailers' minds. There is some promise that mobile commerce will finally gain traction in the coming decade. Mobile payments firm Billing Revolution found that on-the-go consumers are happy to purchase small ticket items like pizza and movie tickets, for example. One market that has shown strong signs of mobile commerce growth is Japan, according to Morgan Stanley . See also our analysis of mobile payments . Conclusion New recommendations technologies make it easier every year for consumers to find what they want, social media has driven a lot of retail activity to small websites and social networks, and mobile commerce has slowly but surely gained a foothold in e-commerce. These are just some of the trends in e-commerce over the past 10 years. While Amazon.com and eBay continue to be the giants of online retail, the Social Web and advances in web technology have both had a big impact this decade. See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media Discuss

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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: E-commerce

It's the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company's first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it's still listed as a "trending topic" as of this morning. But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google's new operating system but the end result doesn't look like the revolutionary, "change the world" product many had hoped for. Sponsor Yes, Chrome OS is Different Don't get us wrong - Google's OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely - everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you'll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube , but it doesn't limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora . To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft's webmail offerings right out of the box. Google's major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud...the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they've made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser , the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year. As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people - especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at - are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience? ...but is it Better? After digesting yesterday's news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down? You Can't Just Install Chrome OS - You Have to Buy a New Netbook To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday's news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google's open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine. Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don't have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there - they can pick and choose which ones to support. They'll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support "mass storage devices" (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they're planning on an "innovative approach" when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they're planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko's and FedEx's online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet. No Other Web Browsers Supported Another big disappointment is the company's decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck - no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out "antitrust!," be warned - Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source - that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully - and haltingly - explained by Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let's get real - Firefox Chrome OS? We don't think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system. Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick. One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A session at the end of the event is how Google's OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn't refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi. Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google's servers. Although Google didn't specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there's no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS's web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser. However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS's support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it's believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS's launch next year, there's no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then. Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser? Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why ? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS's brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser's main window. For example, Google Chat, the company's IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you're viewing. Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting "tab" is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that's certainly a cool feature, it alone isn't a major selling point for the OS. That would be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS. That's not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn't have worthwhile features of its own - like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it's just that these aren't the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that's special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is "it's basically just a web browser." Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet. At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn't up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch - when connected, it's amazing. Offline, not so much. While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time - sooner than you think - when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you've fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that's affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn't arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users. Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively. Discuss

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Was Chrome OS a Disappointment?

A subject of interest to us ReadWriteWeb folks this year has been smart grids - a method of delivering electricity to users' homes in a way that has been the cause of many green technologists for some time. Smart grid tech uses digital means to control appliances at users' homes to save energy, cut costs, and increase reliability. However, some experts are beginning to wonder how safe and anonymous this data is and how much end-user privacy could be compromised. Sponsor And as the concept of "anonymized" user data is continuously being poked full of holes by everyone from hackers to academics, we must wonder just how much smart grids "know" about individuals. For example, the energy fluctuations of home appliances are so unique that a smart grid can tell the make and model of a user's refrigerator. A recently released report from the Future of Privacy Foundation states that although more modernized approaches to energy consumption are absolutely necessary, uninformed enthusiasm about smart grid technology might lead to privacy breaches for end users. "The infrastructure that will support the future Smart Grid," the report reads, "will be capable of informing consumers of their day-to-day energy use, even at the appliance level. While this is beneficial and supports valuable efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce consumers' energy bills, it introduces the possibility of collecting detailed information on individual energy consumption use and patterns within the most private of places - our homes. "We must take great care not to sacrifice consumer privacy amidst an atmosphere of unbridled enthusiasm for electricity reform. Information proliferation, lax controls and insufficient oversight of this information could lead to unprecedented invasions of consumer privacy." Another report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology states that, because of the lack of standards and procedures on data collection and storage, "Distributed energy resources and smart meters will reveal information about residential consumers and activities within the house." The Foundation's co-chair, Jules Polonetsky, stated in a Washington Post interview today, "We're a little worried that without some serious planning now, there's going to be quite a challenge in a couple of years when people start realizing that maybe should think about developing some solid data retention policies that address what's going to be done with all of this data." Valid concerns, all, especially for users who would rather keep themselves, their families, and their homes "off the grid," under the radar, and largely unmonitored by corporate and governmental entities. Will user privacy be the factor that undermines cleaner, smarter energy for all? Or will smart grid companies find better ways to protect user data, just as social networks and marketing firms have had to struggle to do? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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Are Smart Grids Undermining User Privacy?

A few months ago ReadWriteWeb asked the question, "What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?" Our own Sarah Perez covered the rumors surrounding a subscription model, premium services and of course, the much anticipated iPhone application. While Hulu continues to keep mum on its new monetization plans, today's reports reveal that the company is focusing on its music-related content. Sponsor In a company blog post Hulu announced signing a partnership with EMI for Norah Jones content. While Hulu is best known for its HD television and movie programing, the site's latest deal may be a sign of things to come. In the past Hulu has featured music content like its Live from the Artists Den and Live From Abbey Road series', but this latest EMI deal may mean further plans to branch into the music business. Although EMI is Hulu's first external music partnership, the fact that the company began as a collaboration between NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment Group and ABC / Disney means that its music-related reach is likely further than we realize. What's more, the company already has the technology to stream music from their service as the same means can be used for delivering video and music. While it's too early to say how this will play out, if Hulu's decides to bundle on-demand streaming video and music, this iPhone owner would happily subscribe. Discuss

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Hulu and Music: Where There's a Stream There's a Way