Day: June 5, 2007

Offline GMail

Update: Almost 2 years after I blogged about this – Google came up with an offline version. Check it out here

On the Memorial day I went to Chicago to attend a conference on Microfinance( I want to write about this, sometime soon) and also to see my in-laws who live there. I happen to take my laptop along with me thinking that I would spend some time to read my e-books or at least work on some ideas I have been playing with. The Southwest flight was packed and I got sit between two hefty people. That was not at a problem as I had my own entertainment for the next 4 hours. But when I saw my neighbors using their laptops, I was intrigued to see that they are using their spare time to reply all the email they have got and probably catching up with the missed emails.

As of now in my GMail I have 61 unread emails (only Inbox) there are at least couple of hundred in unread email in my other folders. I could have used those 4 hours to read my unread email and probably reply to couple of my friends. But I couldn’t do that because I use GMail. Well, I know I can get my Gmail into my outlook/Thunderbird and read it offline and be happy with it. But I don’t use any other applications as much as I use my browser. With Web 2.0, the browser is the platform. All the earlier application which don’t have any web interface are turning into one because people like to use only browsers and most of them will.

So, I was toying with an idea of how cool it would be if we can have a browser extension which would make GMail access available offline. It wouldn’t be very tough to do something like that. I have known people using Apache Derby for a lightweight database written in Java, which could be used on the client side. All you need to do is to have a local server (Google Desktop already does this) which would check for internet connection and fetch the top 100 (may be inbox only?) and put them under local Derby database. When offline, you still can access the emails and there would be a wrapper around this which would basically use GMail API to send all the offline written emails.

This would solve my problem of being able to see my emails offline and responding to them. Also if you look at the latest technologies – the focus is getting more and more towards “highly intelligent local systems” which can operate both with a internet connection or not. It makes life so easy. And Adobe has taken a step towards that and calls it – Apollo. But you know how Adobe can lock you in their technology platform.

But what was such a sweet surprise was – only couple of days back – Google released something called – Google Gears. I was so surprised to see something coming out exactly when I was thinking about it. Now with Google Gears, what Google has made possible is – it created a framework for creating offline applications just using Javascript. What an amazing idea. It would be matter of days, before there would be applications popping out for GMail, Maps, Google Docs – imagination is your limitation. I know it may not sound as cool as I am describing it here, but believe me when I say as a developer – I don’t have to learn any new Adobe’s proprietary language to do this. I can use my good old Javascript skills to do just this. That’s empowering and liberating for a application developer.

I am waiting for my offline Gmail access now!

Intelligent Skills Recruiter – An Idea

As I was talking to my colleague about how a modern job site should be like – the conversation moved into a very innovative direction. We have seen regular job search sites like, Monster, Dice which cater to a wide array of needs. But if you see ads on those sites, you would observe they mostly deal with full time jobs. That too, they consider a ‘person’ as an entity. Wouldn’t it be cool if you drill it down to a ‘skill’ rather than a person? Let me explain. On the other end of the spectrum, you would find Craigslist which also has job openings, but more informal and cheap options. There too, a lowest level you can drill down to is a ‘person’.

So, here is an idea about a job search engine which would treat ‘skills’ as an exchange commodity. And looking at how fast Globalization is changing the world, I really don’t care if the skills are from India, Estonia, or Ukraine. So, a person who wants to get a project done will approach this ‘job site’ and go through a step by step process to describe his needs. So, for example – I need a project to be done in 2 months – the skill sets I am looking at are: C++, Oracle, Javascript and Adobe Photoshop. Now to find a person who has these skills would be very difficult. But to find people who have these skills individually is easy. So, I can also select my budget for the project and how much share I am willing to give it to C++ skills when compared to Javascript skills.

The second step would be – the intelligent job search agent would look at all the skilled people registered at the site and look at their conditions. Like if I am a developer then I would say – I can only work for 30$/hour rate and I can only spend 20 hours per week. So, look at the project – the site would intimate all the relevant skills people and show them how much share of monies they would get for that gig.

It’s like you are assembling a dynamic team which is based in any part of the world and who can spend certain amount of their time for that particular skill set.  An intelligent algorithm would also keep other candidates(developers) in queue, in case the first round of people default or say No.

Using this site, a Javascript programmer can spend all his time just doing a Javascript on different projects and make money out of it. I kinda vaguely remember that I sort of have come across something like this – but can’t put my finger on it now. But I do think, it’s about time we look at job market rather as skills than people. I am pretty sure that this won’t work out in a full time employee job situation. This is cool and useful to people like me who wants to be traveling and  still keep making money through computer gigs.