Working Offline with Google Reader

Google recently introduced an informal slogan for the company highlighting its focus: Search, ads and apps. This seems to be a resounding confirmation by Google on what has been widely speculated in the industry–that web applications are a big part in Google’s long term strategy. However, Google’s web apps all share a very fundamental problem, many people are hesitant to rely on these services because of the lack of support for offline access. Until now.

In the recently held Google Developer day 2007, Google announced Google gears, an application that will enable third-party developers developers (and of course, Google developers themselves) to provide offline support for web applications. This is big news. The first Google app to support offline mode is Google Reader. This is huge–you now have the freedom to read your subscribed feeds even when you don’t have an active internet connection.

To enable offline support for your Google Reader, first, you need to install Google Gears then close your browser to restart it and log back in to Google Reader. Only after doing this can you download the 2,000 most recent posts in your Google Reader so that you can view them anytime even while offline. To start the download all you need to do is click on the green online icon located at the upper right portion of the page.

Once the syncing process starts you will see the status of your download which shows the number of items being downloaded and a progress bar. Syncing should take just a few minutes the first time.

Once you have downloaded all the items you can then disconnect from the internet. You will notice that the green online icon will turn blue to indicate that you are offline.

After this you can read your subscriptions offline anytime you want to. Note, though, that new entries won’t be coming into your Google Reader while you are offline. However, you can just download the most recent entries next time you go online again.

When using Google Reader offline don’t be surprised if some of its features don’t work. This includes adding to your subscriptions and downloading images and videos. Actions that you can do while still offline include tagging and automatic marking of viewed articles as read.