There is a fascinating transformation now taking place in computing. Mainframe computing relied on dumb terminals and then, as clients became smarter, the migration began toward client/server environments. Over time, news ways of working appeared and disappeared. Most recently, the hosted model has become increasingly important.

Google Gears, for example, allows hosted applications the ability to run when there is no Internet access. It seems now that Gears, as we know it,  is being used to help Web sites offload processing to local computers.

In fact, MySpace (News - Alert) will now use Gears to enable message sorting and searching — all powered by the local PC. As this press release and TechCrunch point out, you won't be able to use the application offline as of yet but this new addition shows that the server processing burden associated with very popular Web sites can be reduced by bringing client PCs into the mix.

This sort of functionality could have been achieved without Gears, but having Google provide the middleware makes sense as it reduces costs and allows users to take advantage of other innovations from the search engine giant.

So where does this innovation lead us? There are a few points worth noting. The first is that we will see an increased reliance on local computers for data storage. This comes with security risk and I expect to hear more about this later.

PCs may someday become a dumping ground for Gears data that is no longer needed. Eventually, a “Gear Sweeper” service might be needed to wipe out data no longer needed but contained in far-reaching directories on client-side computers.

This relatively new use for Gears is only the beginning. It’s possible that peer-to-peer (P2P) cloud computing projects powered by Gears will soon appear to take full advantage of the tremendous amount of unused processing power available on the world’s computers.

 

At a more basic level, using Gears will enable developers to harness local resources for  making Web programs much more software-like. In other words, using AJAX for the interface and Gears for database manipulation, caching and thread pool management/execution, a Web application may be strikingly similar to a local program.

It’s unlikely that movie production will be moved to a hosted model anytime soon, but for everyday applications — especially on the business side — watch for innovation to start increasing at a rapid clip.