But even though adoption has been slow, more and more applications are gradually getting Gears treatments.

Today Google announced that Gmail can now be taken offline with Google Gears, meaning that you can now read and reply to your Gmail messages while you’re disconnected from the interweb, and have all of the email synchronize when you’re back online again.  There are still some bits of functionality that aren’t available in an offline mode – like the calendar, for example – but it’s a great start and about time.

Google Reader has offered offline support through Gears for some time now, and so has Google Docs.  Wordpress, although not an application developed by Google, has featured gears support for some time now.

It’s exciting to see so many powerful and rich applications available for offline use with Gears.  This could be one of those little things that Microsoft hears about and gets them a little bit nervous about the long-term future.  It’s probably far too early to make predictions about how much further web applications will go in replacing traditional desktop applications – and certainly there will always be some applications that will probably never be practical as web applications, like Adobe Photoshop for example.  But traditional “knowledge worker” applications – office productivity applications – seem like prime targets to be replaced by rich web applications.  Reliable and usable offline versions will likely accelerate the pace of innovation in these types of applications, as having an offline version will likely speed up end user adoption.  In other words, I think we’re hitting an inflection point where Google may consider a heavier investment in engineering and development of these tools.  Plus, Microsoft is planning a full web interface of their Office suite with the Office 14 release.  This could be the start of a new software war: the offline office suite war.

But I could be wrong.  As I said, I overestimated how quickly Gears would be adopted in the first place.  So we’ll see, I suppose.  My money is on Google for now, though.

I happened across a great blog post from Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of BDG – the folks behind The Social Collective.  In response to a post about Robert Scoble losing his Facebook account because it was mistaken for a spam account, Chris wrote:

If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!

For your reading ease, here’s the part of Google’s TOS in particular that Chris was referencing:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

(Yes, Google’s TOS agreement does indeed include a misspelling of the word license.)

Chris goes on to point out that this is because Google intends to parse the content and make it available to advertisers so that they’ll know what advertisements to display to you.  The exact section of Google’s TOS doesn’t indicate that you lose any rights over the content that you enter.  You still retain a irrevocable license over it.  But it is clear that Google claims a right to reuse it as they need, and to transfer that right to anyone else.

This brings up an interesting scenario, although probably somewhat unlikely.  Imagine if you posted some great ideas about a product you were building on Google Docs, and you had no intention of disclosing this information with any of your competitors because it was so fantastic.  What would happen if Google either purposefully or accidentally stole that very idea and started building a competing site?  This gets into a legal area that I’m totally unfamiliar with, but would love to find an IP lawyer who might be able to work out the possibilities.  It would seem, though, that Google could make claim that the work you posted was prior art, making any claim to a patent you might have (or be in the process of filing) void and null.

I’m no fan of software patents, though, but I am curious what might happen.

Oh, and remember that Google promised if they do use your ideas, you’ll at least get a shout-out on their blog.

According to the company press release:

LotusLive is designed to help companies work smarter by making it easy for them to connect and work together — with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. LotusLive’s online services give businesses of all sizes access to Lotus’ rich collaboration tools without requiring an up-front investment in IT support resources or infrastructure.

What’s most interesting about this news is IBM’s plans to partner with several key SaaS vendors:

• LinkedIn will provide LotusLive with searchable contact information.
• Salesforce.com will integrate LotusLive services within its CRM application.
• Skype announced plans to integrate voice and video into LotusLive.

Right now only LotusLive Meetings (Lotus Sametime) and LotusLive Events along with the hosted Notes application appear to be available for purchase, with the other solutions still showing up as being in beta.  I wasn’t able to find details on when IBM plans to make the additional functionality available.

The dashboard page for the collaboration component looks a lot like what you might expect from a "web2.0” site, and is actually pretty slick looking.

Even without the details about when it’ll be available, it’s exciting news from IBM, and it stacks up nicely against Microsoft and their plans for more SaaS offerings with the upcoming Office 14 release, as well as Google’s recent push to start selling Google Apps through their recently announced reseller program.

More details at LotusLive.com, full LotusLive press release at IBM.

In order to achieve that, Google wants to hire you to become a reseller of their business applications, and set up small and medium businesses with Google’s SaaS offerings.  The premise is simple and brilliant, and it’s the type of thing that Microsoft has been doing for years with their Microsoft Certified Service Professional program.

Sounds great, so what’s the catch?

The one “gotcha” part of it is that it’s up to you to bill the customer for your services and time, and Google in turn will bill you directly.  But the bonus for you as a reseller is that you can start building a value-add proposition for customers: they trust you to convert them to a lower-cost SaaS offering (or deploy productivity applications in their environment for the first time), and in turn the company continues working with you as a trusted IT services vendor and architect.

Perhaps one possible criticism of Google’s plan to create a reseller program: it seems to be violating one of the principles of the evolving SaaS market.  Specifically, SaaS offerings should be so simple and easy to use that any employee of a company with little to no IT experience should be able to purchase any software-as-a-service direct from a vendor’s website and start using the product immediately.  This perhaps shows a sign of weakness in how easy it is at the moment for companies to transition to Google as a SaaS provider.  But, that criticism aside, Google’s reseller program seems to be a smart move.

Google plans to weed out the flakey service providers by testing your IT skills before authorizing you to be a part of their reseller program.  It’s then up to you to go out and drum up business, and if you aren’t signing up clients, it’s no loss to Google.  Overall it seems like a win-win for Google: they are effectively building an extremely cost efficient sales force (which is almost free to them, aside from the training materials and reseller testing), and these resellers don’t actually make any money from Google.  It’s almost like all of those power eBay sellers who make a living selling their products on eBay.

Getting shutdown (now or soon):

• Google Video
• Google Catalogs Search
• Dodgeball
• Jaiku (may live on w/volunteers)
• Google Mashup Editor

Rumored to be shut down soon:

• Grand Central
• Knol
• Google Base
• Google Notebook

I’d add: Google Sites to that list, too.  But CNET didn’t call it yet.

I’ve got to say: I’m not surprised to see any of these get the ax.  Google Video was replaced by YouTube.  Google Catalog Search turned useless as most companies now offer their catalogs online, and besides there’s Google Book Search still.  Dodgeball — I’d never even heard of it, unfortunately.  Jaiku was similar to Pownce (which is now gone), Twitter, FriendFeed, and many others, but not quite as powerful.  And Google Mashup Editor… Well… Mashups are just a bad idea.  I think it’s time we finally just all admit that real application integration shouldn’t happen on the glass.  It should happen behind the scenes through SOA or even REST.

As for the others: Grand Central: never heard of it.  Knol: why compete with Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers?  And Google Base: I think Craigslist works better.

It’s sad to see these projects go, since it’s a sign of the economic times.

[More details at CNET News]

This is good news for Microsoft, considering that recent research form Forrester shows that services like Google’s Gmail cost 1/3 that of traditional on-site email solutions.  According to Forrester, it costs around $25.18 per month per user for on-site, hosted email vs. $8.47 for Gmail to operate.

Email is one of those services that I still say is easier to convert to SaaS than others.  It’s one I’d really love to see more companies adopt.

Included in the 3.0.1 release: a fix for a crash when right-clicking on a photo, and improved handling of network failures during upload.

This might confirm a suggestion a friend of mine made earlier today: Google rushed the release of Picasa 3 to beat Apple to the punch about announcing iPhoto ‘09.

If Google likes your idea and makes oodles of money off of it, they’ll thank you by giving a shout out on their blog.  It’d be nice if they at least offered you an Android phone (personally I’m still hoping the Kogan Agora comes over from Australia, but the HTC G1 would be fine, too), along with a pre-paid two year contract.

The folks over at Giz seem to think this is a sign that Google is hard hit by the economic turndown, but I’m not so sure I agree.  It sounds more like Google is trying to find other ways to promote Moderator, and at the same time harvest the wisdom of the crowd.

[Google Product Ideas c/o Gizmodo and Slashdot]

Read the full post with screenshot here.

Considering that Facebook was rumored to be making private bids to buy Twitter back in November of this year (c/o TechCrunch), and also considering that Marc Andreessen is sitting on the board for both Twitter and Facebook, it’ll likely be just a matter of time before Facebook responds to Google’s Twitter integration move.

Meanwhile, last week in a Facebook Developer blog post, the team at Facebook put together an 8 minute Mac vs. PC advertisement, er I mean, video tutorial on how to integrate Facebook Connect into your blog site (screencap below).

uTest

Whether this means that Internet Explorer 8 is the most stable of the three is debatable.  One problem in relying solely on bug counts is that it doesn’t give you an idea of where those bugs are, or how likely it would be that a user would be tripped up or completely blocked by the bugs on a frequent basis.

More details at uTest’s company blog.