Google Desktop 3.0 Beta adds sharing: Early but interesting
I finally got around to looking at Google Desktop 3.0 this morning. The major feature that interested me in it was not the sidebar that continues to grow into a larger set of irrelevant distractions on my desktop. Luckily this can be turned off but in general I have noticed that the integration of the services among companies including Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft means that if I didn't manage my desktop effectively I would have 100 windows popping-up when I first logged in trying to tell me the news, how many emails I have, the latest map of Iceland, and who is online in the 20 services I might connect to. So the tools that have been put into place are doing more to bring more information overload by forcing lots of content onto my desktop than they are to reduce it. I would be happy to download a utility that could just find and remove toolbars and start-up processes that the various big portal companies have installed.
What I wanted to take a look at is the new sharing capabilities that allows the user to share content between multiple machines. This feature does work and appears to be a good step towards a next generation where desktops are more linked then ever through search content.
But it does have some interesting challenges:
1. Currently the shared desktop searches go to Google.com's server. If people weren’t already frightened of potential corporate security issues this specific feature may cause some concern. A potential solution to this would be a server that the desktop search tool could connect to as an internal corporate server that performed a similar function. The Google servers seem to store a version of the data on their local servers such that if I were to disconnect my laptop it would still be searchable by the engine. This does make me feel a little insecure about what is being stored on the Google site.
2. While I found the shared desktop tool works I initially had trouble finding the place to manage the searches from different computers. The reason for this is that selecting the remote computer you would like to search requires using the advanced search option in the request. People may also get confused when they first set-up the shared searches across PCs because the searches will appear out of synch e.g. (my laptop while indexing will show 100 files for a search on Dan while my desktop will show that my laptop has 5 files for the search on Dan. There is no trivial solution for this but the first impression is that it is confusing to use this feature.
3. There is some additional sharing in the toolbar for connecting and sending files to your Google contacts. Unfortunately this is just an annoying feature because while I use Skype, Yahoo! IM, and Microsoft Messenger (all at the same time) I don’t use Google Talk so I don’t have any Google contacts to share content with. Trillian solves the chat problem but the need to keep the various portals sticky has made features far less useful. It would be nice to merge the contacts more effectively across these platforms.
The implications of the sharing features are fairly major for vendors who have focused on the area of sharing desktop searches using the API from Google like soonr. While soonr brings the search to the phone it's main interest for me initially was just the ability to share searches across desktops. Now I'd imagine that the soonr team will need to figure out a model that adds more value or stay close to Microsoft and X1/Yahoo! for their partnerships.
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