Library clips

FolderShare - p2p file sharing and synching, also see egnyte and other similar services like Tribler, Tubes, dekoh, izimi, Qnext and Quickeo

Portable Apps - carry your whole office suite on your portable hard drive or USB stick and plug ‘n play, when you are finished none of your personal data is left behind…so this is like using applications without having to install them.

tagsahoy - that latest move is that we now have tools to re-syndicate all our web 2.0 profiles into the one stream (lifestreaming or profile aggregators), secondbrain will even house your files and create collections. Now tagsahoy will search across all your profiles, perhaps something Dave Pollard was looking for, a Google virtual search for all your web 2.0 profiles.
Supported sites include del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, Squirl, LibraryThing and Connotea, with more coming soon!

Nenest - a form and application builder, maybe similar to WayaCracker.

ypen - write online notes that you can access at a URL, see ChangeToLink and others. [via DI]

Google Gears is a new service that enables offline access to web-based services, perhaps you could call it a RIA enabler…Google Gears is a developer tool, and we can expect to see more of it soon, no doubt to read Gmail offline.

The idea is to be able to have desktop functionality and/or to be able to use web-based services when you are not online.

Sometimes it also refers to accessing web-based services when you are online, but without having to use the traditional browser, my favourite for a long time has been the Google deskbar (now only available with the Google Desktop), but you can get it here.
Anyway the Google Deskbar sits under the task bar as a search box, and you can search Google and browse websites without even opening the browser…I posted about it as a handy tool to search my blog posts.

Another rich service is the Google Notebook, you do need a browser window open, but you don’t have to go to the Google Notebook homepage to use it. On the bottom right hand corner of your window or on the toolbar is a notebook icon, clicking on this reveals a drop window where you can use all the functions…to tell you the truth I’ve used Google Notebook daily since its release and have only visited the homepage a handful of times.

Webtops don’t really fit into the RIA scenario as they contain a suite of web apps that are all organised for you in one page that mimics the look of the traditional desktop.

When I think RIA, I think lots of things, like; browserless, mouse and browser extension, offline version, synching…here are a mixed bag, (not including desktop widgets and system tray apps):

Trillion astra, NewsGator online, and Attensa Online (right-click functionality), Box, Zoho (desktopize), ThinkFree, Gmail and Blogger hack(Dojo), ShareMethods, Calgoo (Google Calendar), Tubes, FireFox 3.0, Apollo, Silverlight, Wallnote, Sharpcast, Zimbra, Scrybe, Qube, egnyte and SocialText.

Something else that could fit into this is accessing and streaming your PC content from your mobile phone, I noticed my phone provider has a service called orb, and there is a popular one called Soonr. It won’t be long till mobile web is more accessible so we can stream stuff from all our web 2.0 profiles. I like the idea of a mobile phone kind of like being a remote control to access your PC server, or web stuff, and the reverse to perhaps stream stuff back, like Comvu.

Read/Write Web has more on Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Google Reader Offline

The offline functionality is due to a browser extension, once you have installed Google Gears, next time you use Google Reader it will let you know what mode you are currently in, online or offline. If you click to go offline, it will store the last 2000 posts on your computer. Pretty cool if your work computer is a laptop for the commute home on the train.

Once you go back online (whether you have finished reading all your content or not) and launch Google Reader it will say you are in offline mode, meaning you will not get any new content as long as you are in this mode (but there is nothing stopping you to continue reading your left over content in offline mode even though you are actually online).
Anyway, once you click to online mode all the items you have read, starred, etc…are synched.

The issue I had when I was reading offline is that I accidentally closed the Google Reader window, that’s it, I lost it, I couldn’t get it back up because I was offline.
So I like that you can still read your stuff offline without having to download an actual client (Google Gears is not specific to Google Reader, it will provide this same functionality to other Google products), but I wouldn’t mind the option of downloading a desktop Google Reader.
Reason being is I could turn off my PC and then turn it back on, still being offline, launch Google Reader and resume reading my content.
A traditional desktop RSS Reader will allow you to go online to get all your updated items, and then go offline to read, but you are reading using an offline client, not a remaining open window from your online session.

Sync a Desktop and web based RSS Reader

Bloglines Sync, eg. synch BlogBot for Outlook with Bloglines, Feed Demon Bloglines channel

This has the benefit of using a desktop client, like I said before, with Google Reader offline you are just using the remaining open window from when you were online, if you accidentally close it then you have to go online again and offline to just get the window back.

Sync across multiple desktop RSS Readers

RSS Bandit has a helpful explanation.
Once you leave your work computer you upload your “state” as a zip file to I guess a hosted server, this uploads the state of your items (eg. starred, marked read, but not the actual items), then at your home computer you download your “state” and all is synched, ready to read from where you left off.
BlogBridge and I’m guessing now most RSS Readers are into the sync game.

The issue with Google Reader is that the synching is from the same computer, if you went offline with a computer you will have to go sync online with the same computer. It’s not the same as synching across different PC’s.

Is this correct…anyone??

Another scenario:
Go offline at home and read a while, but you don’t have time to go online again to sync up before you go to work. So then when you go online at your work computer it can’t synch up with the data from your home computer…not sure what happens.
If this downloaded data was kept on a hosted server, then it doesn’t matter which computer you are on at any given time in the process…but this seems impossible as when you are offline the data or state is recorded on your local PC.

Offline web browsing

Where this experience would be extrememly augmented is when you go into offline mode, the data includes not only the content from your RSS Reader, but also links to other webpages.

This way I can read an item offline and click on a hyperlink in this item and still be able to view it offline.
And just the same if I’m reading content offline and the item doesn’t come from a full-text feed, then I want to be able to click to see the whole article and be able to read it offline at the native web page.
This comes full circle with my post from last year on Webaroo.

Full Offline experience

- Read your RSS items and have them synched when you go back online
- Read old items in your RSS Reader and search them
- Able to click to the native post from one of your RSS items
- Able to click a hyperlink of a webpage in your RSS items and read the native webpage (the buck would have to stop there, you wouldn’t be able to then read a webpage linked to from this webpage and so on…)
- Read all your own blog posts from your offline blogging client (eg. Qumana)

This way you can read new and old stuff, read your own stuff, and cut n paste permalinks and links from your past blog posts and create new blog posts.
When you go back online, your RSS Reader synchs and your blog posts are published…and you’re ready to do it again!!