I think that Google Gears is one of the most exciting developments around at the moment. It's a library that anyone can use to build offline capabilities into their web based application. Firefox is doing something similar for FFv3, but fortunately working with Google on creating a standard interface - which would mean an application would work irrespective of which (Firefox or Google) offline library was in use. This is going to transform our use of the web.
Well, Google's Feed Reader (Google Reader) now has offline capabilities using Google Gears. It was the lack of this capability in web based readers that motivated me to push a desktop feed reader as our standard - and we ended up with RSS Bandit. So I gave it a go and it one feature that I wish RSS Bandit has - it shows links that haven't had postings for a while... dead blogs. This feature greatly enhances how you manage information sources, keeping the feeds trim.
I was preparing to ditch RSS Bandit and try Google Reader for a few weeks to see how I got on, when I discovered that Google Gears won't install on a machine inside a firewall. So I could do this at home, but not in the office. Doh!
Although this might sound like I nearly found an RSS Bandit Killer, that is not the case. The biggest remaining weakness of online readers like this is that they cannot access internal feeds.
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