Offline Gmail – Made for Pakistan

Part of the magic that the search company has been able to cast on the human race has to do with its very deep strategic thinking bit. Email, at least a few years (months?) ago, had been the killer application on the Internet. Google targetted web based email services segment with the fast and efficient Gmail service and ever since than, they had been busy making it more and more useful by adding features that would let people just glued to the application.

Google Gears, the component that lets websites operate more like desktop applications, has now been tweaked to serve Gmail in ‘offline’ modes. Yes, out there they mean offline when traveling by air or in the train but for us here in Pakistan (and I guess the entire region), connectivity can never be taken for granted. Hence, the newly introduced Offline Gmail (still in the labs) has a lot more application instances than just traveling and this has more to do with the next billion people who are, or will soon be, about to go online on patchy and flip-flop networks worldwide. 

In the backdrop of the addiction to online documents and Gmail (now with the powers of enduring the outages caused by ‘traveling’ in the west or by KESC/Wapda here at home)  Google’s Chrome, with its built in support for Goolge Gears  (you don’t need a plugin for that in Chrome) and sepearately processed tabs is gently holding us by the arms and taking us from Deskabad to Cloudpur. And before we realize, the desktop (as we know it) would go the dodo’s way.