MySpace Message Center is now searching with Gears




MySpace announced new functionality into their MySpace Message Center today at Google I/O.

One feature that they were lacking was the ability for MySpace users to actually search their MySpace messages. To go through mail, users have to page through all of their messages until their find the right one. Not optimal to say the least!

They could have tried to do search on the server side, but it can be a very expensive operation, and when you are at MySpace scale, you have to choose your battles.

With server side search out, they looked at doing the work on the client. They ended up with a Gears powered solution that not only searches, but gives back results in real-time as you are typing it in. This means that you can stop typing earlier, as you find what you are looking for.

The MySpace team has been a pleasure to work with, and were very fast to put the pieces together of an Full Text Search datastore, and the WorkerPool to offload the search without hanging the browser. As I type this Owyn Richen is going over the details of the implementation at his Google I/O session.

We are excited to see them launch, and look forward to seeing what else they come up with!

New Gears and AJAX sessions posted for Google I/O





Google I/O is just a few weeks away (May 28 - 29). If you haven't already, don't forget to register for the event. We now have over 80 sessions posted, including a number of new sessions on Gears and AJAX technologies, including:

Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline - Lessons Learned from Google Docs
With the release of Google Docs offline, we asked the team if they could provide developers with some lessons learned. Google engineer Steve Saviano will explain the challenges that his team faced taking Google Docs offline with Gears and how they overcame them.

Gears and MySpace - an Exploration of Powering Search on the Client
Owyn Richen of MySpace will discuss their thoughts on using Google Gears to provide data-intensive features like adding search to their mail system.

HTML5, Brought to You by Gears
Aaron Boodman, whom many of you know as part of the core Gears team and also from Greasemonkey fame, will be talking about how the Google Gears mission relates to future web standards like HTML5.

Can We Get There From Here?
Alex Russell, co-creator of The Dojo Toolkit, looks at the state of the web development stack and the differing views and approaches to advancing development within a browser.

Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++
Chris Prince, also known in the UK as the Gears engineer with the best beard, will give a sneak peek at what's coming in Gears. You may be surprised that *none* of the features are related to offline. Rather, they fall under the broader Gears vision of improving web browsers.

Be sure to visit the website to see the complete list of sessions and to register. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount.