San Francisco — MySpace, the world’s widely admired social networking web site, today announced that it is adding a new feature that will enhance functionality of MySpace mail using Google Gears, giving users the ability to search and sort their mail in real-time.
“The new feature, which uses Gears technology, was announced during a Google conference in San Francisco.”
Google Gears is an open-source offline web application API development platform it debuted last year at its developer conference, which an individual user downloads for free.
“Gears broadens’ the browser by taking advantage of storing data from the cloud on the user’s local machine,” said Allen Hurff, senior vice president of engineering at MySpace.
The application allows programs that are operational in the web browser to enter in to the user’s own CPU and storage. This enables offline accessibility to web applications richer without breaking the site owner’s infrastructure.
Gears also empowers’ users with bulky inboxes and vast numbers of friends to search and sort their mail quickly. Rather than clicking through page after page to find a specific message, users can now type in any keywords related to the message and the results show up in real time.
“Working at a scale with four to six million simultaneous users a day, we are saving significant and expensive server-side resources by creating this feature utilizing Gears,” Hurff said.
Like most e-mail and social networking sites that have climbed up in popularity in recent years, MySpace faces an ever-growing demand for data storage. The site’s owners say it averages about 170 million mail messages are sent per day.
When MySpace users reach their mailbox, they will be asked to install Google Gears, said Hurff, in an appearance here Wednesday at the Google I/O conference. “It is available to everyone today,” Hurff said.
Hence, some of those messages are going into already-crowded mailboxes. The Gears element is estimated to help organize that data by allowing users to search and sort through their mail. For users with more than 5,000 mail messages, MySpace says it is prompting the community to opt-in to the new feature by clicking to download Gears.
“Instead of clicking through page by page to find a specific message, users can now type in any keywords related to the message and the results show up in real time, as the user types,” officials say.
The new tool symbolizes the largest third party accomplishment of Gears and the first time a search and sort mail functionality has been made available on MySpace.
“Our goal here is to broadly make the Web work better,” Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said.
On Wednesday, Google announced it is renaming the project’s title from Google Gears to just Gears.
“We want to make it clear that Gears is not just a Google thing,” said Chris Prince, a Google software engineer, in a blog posting. “We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the Web platform.”
Google also announced that it is expanding browser support for Gears. “We are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile,” Prince said.
Although, always apprehensive about privacy, MySpace officials say the download process is secure. Any users with Gears already installed will have the new feature available today, according to the company.
Linus Upson, director of engineering for the Gears team at Google, said the new feature is designed to make the application feel more natural.
“MySpace’s new mail capabilities built on Gears are a great example of how web apps can get more powerful and useful for users,” Upson said. “We look forward to MySpace drawing upon their experience delivering web services to millions of users to contribute innovative ideas and feedback into the Gears community.”
Other sites using Gears include Google’s Reader and Docs, as well as Zoho.