One of the things that has made it easier for me to put off posting to the .org is the fact that hardly anyone else I know seems to post very often these days. I’ve subscribed to nearly every blog I follow in the Google Desktop Web Clips app for Google Desktop on the side of my desktop, and over the past year or so I can’t help but notice that so many blogs that were once updated two or three times a week are now updated only once a week, if that. Granted, a lot of these people now use Twitter, as do I, and I make it a point not to go a day without tweeting, but things are different for me because I’m a writer, and I can’t very well market my writing skills without writing more often than I have here for the past four months. Now that my winter classes are over, I’m going to try to get better at posting regular updates here.
However, as I was thinking about how rarely I see a blog update on the RSS feed on my Google Desktop, I couldn’t help but think about how rarely I even use Google Desktop any longer. I like having the time and temperature on my desktop at all times (I auto-hide my taskbar so I have more desktop space), but right now those are the most useful parts of my setup. I used to use the built-in MP3 player, but when I started using last.fm I had to switch to Windows Media Player because last.fm doesn’t support the Google Desktop player. (Winamp once fired Bonnie, and Apple products are right out for me, so don’t try to get me to switch over.) Worse yet, the Google news feed has only been sending me stories from ESPN.com for the past couple of months, and most of them are days if not weeks old. Given that I don’t make much use at all of the indexing feature of Google Desktop, it seems to be a real waste for me at this point.
What makes matters worse is that I’m using an older version of Google Desktop, and I’m guessing that switching to a newer version might correct this problem. However, the new version of Google Desktop on the Google Desktop site only supports 32-bit Windows, and I’m running 64-bit right now. I don’t understand why Google wouldn’t choose to support 64-bit Windows, and why they would just drop it like they have when older versions of the software used to work fine for me. I’m used to seeing this kind of behaviour from other companies — Hewlett-Packard refuses to release a Vista driver for my old scanner, so I’m stuck having to buy a new one some time soon — but this isn’t the kind of behaviour I’d expect from Google. Google Desktop was a great product for me at one point, and I feel like it may yet be of some use to me, but right now it’s just taking up space on the right side of my desktop and not really being that useful. Maybe I should just get rid of it and start visiting the blogs I like manually; it’s not like they update that often these days.