So Dave has, once again, taken the attitude that someone else’s new creation is No Big Deal because he has done something like that before. This most recent act of self-aggrandizing hubris is in regards to the new Google Gears launch. Dave writes:
I read that Google is going to announce a toolkit today that lets you run web apps on a disconnected machine. Something we had working in Radio in 2001. The key is something called a desktop web server. Nothing revolutionary about it.
Ignoring the fact that Dave goes thermonuclear if anyone insinuates that RSS was no big deal because people had done it before, he’s just wrong. Gears, while having some of the same effects, is not just a replica of Radio. There are some big differences.
The most important of which is that Gears is a browser extension, not a full webserver install. It doesn’t lock you in to a platform or require you to learn to code through Dave’s virtual chicken scratch. Radio didn’t allow for “offline” websites, it simply kept a replica of a server so that you never were offline. Similar net result, but not the same thing.
Of course, this kind of response is no surprise. Google is evil, remember? So the most insulting thing Dave can think of to do is to take credit for getting there first. Google won’t need to reply… in a month Gears will have wider distribution than Radio ever did.
It’s like what, the 2nd day of Google Gears, and it ALREADY has a wider distribution than Radio ever did.
It appears that Google Gears disintermediates the web server… it “routes around it”. It has a database and embeds into the browser to maintain the user interface for a web app can cache content and behavior.
The trick will be maintaining such an architecture while maintaining the security and integrity of the user’s system. Such programmable environments become the playground of the more devious programmers in the world.
The internet continues to scale in multiple dimensions and Uncle Fluffy does not. The vast majority of us cannot keep up with the rate of change in technology. It’s always a young brain’s turf… that bleeding edge.