posted 2007/10/17 at 20:38
I've continued to use Google Desktop for the past several days, and even though I think I'm going to use it instead of Yahoo! Widgets for desktop tools, I'm still not entirely happy with the way a lot of the components have been working. (If anyone else uses Google Desktop, does Google's built-in music player consume a lot of RAM? Any time I try to do any wide-ranging search with it, my system seems to halt to a crawl, and I don't have that many MP3s on my computer.
I've appreciated the news feed that Google includes standard with Google Desktop, but I continue to be perplexed at the stories it selects to put in the window. Every day I get a large number of stories on European rugby and cricket, and while I have a passing interest in both sports I can't think any reason why Google would select all those stories for me. More to the point, I'm not sure how the content-selection system works, but only having the option to say "Don't show me more stories like this" doesn't help me that much. For example, I keep getting conservative op-ed columns from a British newspaper, and I'm not sure how pressing the "no more like this" button would work. I'd like to get op-ed columns, but I'd prefer them to be from American papers and news sources (I haven't seen a single American op-ed in the feed), and I'd like to at least get a more balanced selection of opinions than just conservative ones if not a greater tilt towards progressive, liberal columnists. It seems to me that it would be a lot simpler to just have checkboxes to say whether or not you want US news, world news, financial news, sports news, op-eds, and so on. I know Google loves its shiny technology and all, but in this case I just don't like the content selector for the news unit, and I still can't see the logic in what it thinks I want to read.
I suppose that I could use Google's RSS feed component as a kind of personalized news feed, but I'm running into a couple of problems there. First of all (and this is not Google's fault but it still creates a problem for me), nearly all of the progressive Websites and blogs I visit have already shifted into "we know Hillary stinks but if you vote Nader/Green you're worse than the conservatives" mode, making it difficult for me to find a good selection of progressive-minded RSS feeds that don't actively tick me off. (As of now, the Green Party's own RSS feed is the only one I've added.) Secondly, so far I've been using the RSS feed to keep up with my friends' entries on their Websites (most notably Ariel, Don, and Sterling), and it would be nice if I could have two copies of the component in my sidebar, so I could keep friends' writings and my personal news feed separate. I still can't find a way to get Google Desktop to let me do that, though, and I don't want to go through the trouble of writing my own component just to be able to keep two separate customizable RSS viewers.
Still, I suppose that what I have right now on there is decent, and I've certainly found ways to help maximize my productivity through some of the other components. Between that and downloading Trillian and finally making myself available on instant messenger services on a regular basis for the first time in ages, though, I'm finding that I've basically divided the widescreen flat panel I've been testing out here into two parts: a conventional-aspect left side for all my usual applications, and a bar on the right side for Trillian and Google Desktop. I wonder if other people who use widescreen flat panels on a regular basis do the same thing with their desktops.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon