Brad Neuberg, Google Gears, and the Future of the Web

Linux.com has an interesting look at Google Gears and one of its leading evangelists, Brad Neuberg. "For Neuberg -- as for most developers -- the idea of expanding the Web's capabilities is intriguing in itself. But both inside and outside Google, his argument is that there's more at stake than just a particular piece of technology. In fact, he does not even seem particularly concerned whether Gears or some rival project takes on the role he envisions. What matters, he says, is that finding a solution to the problems of the Web is essential not only to the continued evolution of the Web, but also to its continued freedom. "

Why does the web need to evolve

[DarkOx]

Why do we have to continue developing the web and forceing it do things way outside is problem domain. USENET did not have to evolve, ftp did not have to evolve, smtp did not, gopher did not, etc etc.

Why can't we leave the web alone, use it for what we use it for now and develop a new rich application protocol if that is what people want. It might end up replacing the web like the web replaced gopher, which replaced Archie before it, or it might become an addition to the suite of internet protocols. Why does my web browser have to be all things to all people?

Yahoo Pipes?

[Sparr0]

The most awesome Web 2.0 tool that Google didn't invent...

http://blog.pipes.yahoo.com/about-pipes/ [yahoo.com]

From... YAHOO?!?

Pipes lets you use a GUI to write little 'programs' (functions appear as elements in a flowchart) that aggregate and process data from almost any source on the web. For fun, my first pipe was a simple experiment, I took the slashdot RSS feed and performed a flickr search on all the "imporant" keywords in each story title, then presented a list of stories+photos. Was easy, educational, funny in many cases, and not completely useless.

Re:Fairly Rhetorical... Maybe I didn't understand?

[BradNeuberg]

How does a guy who says 'Lets keep it working so it can still be used' qualify as news... I thought it was just common sense!

Hi, I agree its common sense :) The cool thing about Gears is its trying to create a system to make this common sense actually happen on todays web. It will be great when its no longer news because the web has an open source update mechanism to get new standards and innovations into the web.

Best,
    Brad Neuberg

Re:Why does the web need to evolve

[BradNeuberg]

Why do we have to continue developing the web and forceing it do things way outside is problem domain. USENET did not have to evolve, ftp did not have to evolve, smtp did not, gopher did not, etc etc.

Why can't we leave the web alone, use it for what we use it for now and develop a new rich application protocol if that is what people want. It might end up replacing the web like the web replaced gopher, which replaced Archie before it, or it might become an addition to the suite of internet protocols. Why does my web browser have to be all things to all people?

Hi DarkOx, the history of the web itself is one of evolving it away from its original problem domain. Even the addition of images was controversial; the web was initially meant to be a text-only medium. Unfortunately, large-scale open systems like the web evolve from simple systems into domains they were never meant for; this is just the nature of systems that are world-spanning like the Internet and Web. Systems that are perfect and self-contained don't tend to actually get adopted on a global scale. Clay Shirky has a great essay on this topic called "In Praise of Evolvable Systems" which you can read here: http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html

The idea behind Gears is to be able to get new technologies (and existing standards we've been waiting years for) into the contemporary web so that we can actually use them today.

I agree that it would be great to have better rich application protocols. Two things you must make sure of to be successful with this though: first, successful systems tend to evolve from earlier ones; just creating an entire new system will probably not get adopted. If you can evolve the web from the inside out into your system it will have better adoption. Second, the thing that makes the web really unique is that web pages can be basic static documents all the way to full blown applications, and everything in between (just look at MySpace, which are a fusion of web pages + web applications mashed up). Just making another web clone of the desktop based paradigm will probably not be successful or move things forward.

Best,
    Brad Neuberg

Re:should he not have used a car analogy?

[BradNeuberg]

"There's only a brief period of time in which things are fluid and can change," he says. "For radio, it was the '20s, and for TV the '50s. Then things crystallize, and we have to live with those changes. Right now, the Internet is malleable, and we can put our stamp on it."

IMHO this comparison is totally off. Radio's and tv's are simple devices that cannot be 'changed' once they are in the customers hands. Computers are totally different. Applications and even protocols come (and sometimes go); Even TCP/IP is about to undergo a mayor 'upgrade'.

He may be right, but this analogy does nothing to convince of that.

It's not just about being able to technologically upgrade something; it's also about how power starts to become concentrated and those with their hands on the levers don't want to change things. We could have distributed TV and radio far more than we have, especially in the 70s when cable TV came along, then in the 80s when satellite TV appeared, and so on. It wasn't until streaming video, which helps to shift power, that TV can once again be revisited and the model in which it works.

I agree with you that TVs and radios are far more fixed and non-upgradable than computers are. However, at some point the network itself will be hard to upgrade, which we are already finding with IPv4. Its gets asymptoticly harder to upgrade deployed systems over time. I joined the Gears team because it seemed like a clever way to help delay this on the web for a bit.

Best,
    Brad Neuberg

Re:Expanfing the internet

[BradNeuberg]

You mean mobile internet?

BTW, Gears is starting to work on mobile phones. Its currently only on Windows Mobile, but will be on other cell phones with the same API. Gears is not just about expanding the desktop web; its about expanding the mobile web as well.

Best,
    Brad Neuberg

Re:Why does the web need to evolve

[BradNeuberg]

The problem though is plugins. Why do you even need Flash/Java plugins? All the Flash one seems to do is use up 100% CPU on Linux and Java Applets are too slow for general use many times. AJAX (sorta) fixes this with how you don't need a plugin to view things and because it is not outside of the browser, it makes having your browser be 100% open source whereas Flash is proprietary (unless you want to use GNASH which, in my experience only really lets you view banner ads). So while a different protocol would be nice, AJAX is much much nicer then Flash/Java or other "plugins" that are used to create applications on websites.

Hi Darkness, the idea behind Gears is that Ajax is the platform (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XHR, etc.). However, there are some new features (and existing standards like HTML 5) that Ajax and web applications need to move forward and be truly successful, such as better performance, client-side relational storage, offline, etc. We aren't trying to replace Ajax with another model.

Best,
    Brad Neuberg

Re:Google vs. Ajax

[BradNeuberg]

Gears is clearly a necessary technology for the Web. The only concern I have is that it's so fundamental that it should not be part of a plugin, but rather built into the browser. I understand they're doing it as a plugin because they want it to work everywhere, but since it's open source, everyone with a browser really should be treating it as an API and writing their own browser components that map to it (or adapting the Gears source to do so).

I'd love for folks to just grab the Gears source and bake those APIs into their browser; its under a Apache-like license so thats easy to do. The first thing browser folks should do, though, is adopt the HTML 5 interfaces, and simply use the Gears code as the implementation. Getting HTML 5 into the browsers is the most important thing. Once you have this bake the extra Gears stuff in, plus the Gears update mechanism so we can keep innovating past HTML 5! Feel free to contact me if you want to do this.

BTW, one thing that make Gears unique is that its _not_ just bound to one browser; its cross browser, so we can rev the web rather than just one browser.

Best,
    Brad Neuberg

Further adoption

[enjahova]

After reading the article (really!) I can see how Gears is more than just offline storage, but extending the browser to do what it should. Right now it is only available as a FF plugin right? Could it be expanded into the google toolbar? ported to IE in the toolbar?

I want to look at this as a way to make even more powerful webapps, but until it gets more widespread it only seems appealing to apps that have a clear offline use.