On Wednesday, Google held its annual I/O software developers conference in San Francisco and announced changes to its Google Earth 3D mapping software and Google Gears.

Google Gears, or “Gears” as it’s to be known, is a set of online development tools for webmasters. According to Vic Gundotra, the vice president of engineering, mobile and developer divisions at Google, The new app is intended to underscore the company’s belief that Gears is a community-driven project.

During his Key note speech, Gundotra told the audience that the company wants to accelerate the capability of the browser.

Now one year old, the open-source ‘Gears’ project has got some big plans for the year ahead. In the first year, Gears concentrated on offline-enabled applications. However, in an effort to “close the gap between Web apps and native apps” the company said it would spend its second year trying to solve some of the issues surrounding web applications.

To ensure Gears is available to everyone, Google has said it will add support for Firefox 3 and Safari to its support for Internet Explorer and earlier versions of Firefox. Opera is also working to support Gears on the desktop and mobile devices.

Google Earth has also been given an overhaul. With the Google Earth API (application programming interface) browser plug-in, Google has taken, what used to have to be downloaded and made it available through a web browser.

The API enables web developers to embed the 3D application in to their web pages in the same way they have been able to use Google Maps API.

Google has recorded 400 million downloads of Google Earth so releasing the API is a demonstration of its belief in the “value of being open.” The hope is that developers will use the API to “build the next great geo-based 3-D application.”

Now developers can embed Google Earth inside any web page with a few lines of code, and an extensive JavaScript API allows developers to control the camera and create lines, markers and polygons. Good news if you want to import 3-D models from the Web and overlay them anywhere on the planet.

Technical lead of the Google Earth Browser Plug-in, Paul Rademacher wrote in his blog,

“You can even overlay your content over different planets, stars and galaxies by toggling Sky mode, letting you build 3-D Google Sky mashups. You can also enable 3-D buildings with a single line of JavaScript, attach JavaScript callbacks to mouse events, fetch KML (keyhole markup language) data from the Web and more.”