Google’s I/O conference keeps offering news as the company announced yesterday a deal with the popular social networking web site MySpace.

The deal involves the use of the Google Gears to make MySpace easier to use. Google Gears will be used to download mail messages and details from contact lists in order to be better accounted for, indexed and stored.

 The new feature allows users to skip the irritating continuous scrolling and sort their mail messages by date, subject, status – read/unread and from. The results of each search will appear in real time, with each letter typed by the user closing in on the search’s objective. Also, the site’s users will be able to instantly view the full text of their messages without any page refreshes or new window.

According to the company’s estimates, more than 170 million messages are being sent every day and the new feature will be initially available for all users with at least 5,000 mail messages in their inbox.

Gears is an open-source development platform that users can download for free and it allows access to services that are normally only available online. It uses a database engine installed on the client’s system that locally caches the data.  

"Our goal here is to broadly make the Web work better," Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said, explaining that Gears is not only a Google thing and that many others can benefit from its release.