MySpace and Gears

MySpace is a heavy adoptor for Google Gears. Looks like they used Gears effectively and took advantage of the features available in Gears. Couple of examples mentioned in the conference

1. Search feature for power user. In this scenario, someone could search for a friend in the list (trust me 0.1% of the MySpace users have > 10,000 friends. I guess they need this feature) and Gears will bring it up as the users type the criteria. This feels like Google Suggest. But powerful than that. The data is locally cached and brought up as required and the UI changes based on the requirement.
2. Message enhancements

When is Google Gears a good choice

• Our user base should have plug-in installed. Chances are... users download it, much like they download Flash plugin. Thanks to Adobe.
• If we have some control on the users and their browsers (typically corporate intranets), then we can push this plugin
• Added functionality is compelling enough to download the plugin? What will users do if the app we build requires them to download the plugin. I think the users and their behavious is changing (again, thanks to Adobe), so chances are this could become ubiquitous so we can ignore this as a requirement

We need to keep this in mind when building Gears apps

• Users may have multiple machines, we need to be cognizant of that
• Worker pool threads are great for processing on the client side
• we need to account for shared OS login scenario.

Questions? owyn@myspace.com