Nick Gonzalez has reported that the first demo of Gears will be for Google Reader, but assures us more Google applications are soon to come. He explains,

Reader will add a green download button to the user interface. When you click the button, Reader will download the last 2,000 messages to your computer, preparing your computer to work offline or under a spotty internet connection. Downloading will take place in the background, using the asynchronous JavaScript API. While offline you can read these articles and carry out your usual sharing and tagging. When you get back online, just click the button and Reader will sync your offline activity with their server. Right now the syncing is initiated manually, but it’s easy to see that it will become more seamless as the program develops. Gears could conceivably solve the large data overhead problems of Google’s AJAX applications, pushing updates to your desktop instead of slowing down your browser.

The real news is that the company is releasing the tools using an open source license. It got our attention, and I suspect the attention of thousands of other developers. Smart, very smart. Read more at the BBC.

I’m a Second Life fan, but sometimes the hype gets to be a little too much. At any given time up to 20,000 or so people are logged in to the service. That’s not enough adoption to justify putting Second Life in the same sentence as Mosaic and Mozilla just yet. Today, it’s the playground for just a few hard core users who can live with an annoying server lag and who, apparently, spend at least some of their time gleefully throwing penises at others. Second Life is a really fancy hosting business, since their main revenue source is renting servers for people who buy islands and other real estate. At current growth trends, though, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened.

The current issues at TechCrunch UK (assuming you know about that situation) could have been avoided if Sam simply wrote his post as a draft and waited a day, or simply clicked “Edit timestamp” to publish the next day in his WordPress CMS.  On Mike’s personal blog he even admits:

Sam and I exchanged words this morning and I said he basically fired himself with that second to last post promoting his events. But nothing had been publicized and we certainly could have discussed a work around, public apology, retraction, etc. But the next thing I knew he’d posted on the blog about his dismissal. Until that happened, everything was reversible. After he took that step, the situation was no longer able to be resolved.

Get it?  Sam could have likely resolved the situation had he simply waited a day before lashing out on his blog.  We all have disagreements.  We all get angry.  But at the end of the day cooler heads prevail and we figure out how to work together.  Bloggers should remember ~ social media is very powerful, far more powerful than one-to-one conversations such as email.  You have a responsibility to think about society before posting (not just your own immediate gut reaction).  Just my two cents…

• elfURL ~ URL Shortner [source code link to svn]
• FeedVault ~ OPML file storage [source code link to svn]
• FrankenFeed ~ RSS feed merger [source code link to svn]
• InstantFeed ~ RSS feeds via email [source code link to svn]
• QwikPing ~ Ping Server [source code link to svn]
• SocialMail ~ RSS via email [source code link to svn]

The repositories can be accessed either by browser or via the svn client. The svn username is “anonymous” and the password is blank.

* To be clear, it is our intent that anyone who modifies the code MUST release those modifications publicly. If you modify the code for use as your own hosted service we require that you release the modified code. Get it? There is some confusion about this point in the open source community. The license explains that you are required to do so if you distribute or publish the code and some argue that a hosted application does not constitute “distribution” or “publishing” of the code and as such you are not required to release the modifications. We understand the confusion, but want to be very clear, for the purposes of our license hosting the source code for other’s use constitutes distribution or publication of the binary code. This is detailed in the source code files as well. Enjoy!

Mike Arrington has the lowdown on today’s launch of the public beta of Flock, the much talked about social browser.  He has also posted a podcast with Flock’s founders.  It’s been sometime since we played with Flock, but nice guy  says that they have come a really long way.  Worth checking out.   Let us know your thoughts.