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Friday, February 10, 2006
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.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Is Blinkx throwing in the desktop search towel
In reading a recent article about a new service from Blinkx to handle video search it appears that they are no longer focusing on the desktop market and are going to concede to let Microsoft and Google dominate the market for the desktop search utilities. This quote is excerpted from the article ITN selects start-up Blinkx for video search.
But speaking on Tuesday, Chandratillake explained that Blinkx's focus is now very much on video search. "Desktop search is a pretty boring business to be in. It's becoming commoditised, and it will be a non-industry within the next 12 months," said Chandratillake, who pointed ou that many companies now offer very proficient desktop search applications. " That functionality is getting built into the operating system now. It's very hard to persuade users to download extra tools when the operating system does the job so well," he added.
I have to agree with their observation that unless something very special is available in a desktop search tool (like enterprise hooks, specialized security, or collaboration) then it will not survive long as a competitor to the free and bundled search tools that are currently available on the market. What is interesting about the Blinx statement is that they are not completely saying that they are abandoning the desktop search market yet. So maybe there will be a Blinkx tool to search personal archives of videos and audio files based on recognizing the imprint of the sounds.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Where is the desktop in Web 2.0?
As the year comes to a close as a start-up we are hearing more and more about how 2005 was the year of Web 2.0. With articles like Web 2.0 mania revives dot-com investing and Wall Street Journal's Best of Web 2.0 it looks like some of the major shifts to a more dynamic web are becoming better understood and gaining traction both with consumers and with enterprises. Hey - Newsgator just announced that they have already deployed 20 enterprise RSS server customers. But along with the rush to make collaborative services for sharing photos, links, and to do lists there is the other trend of people finally getting some of the tools they are looking for onto their computer desktop. The big ones for 2005 was the desktop phone thanks to Skype and the usable desktop search thanks to X1, Google, and Microsoft. But in general the desktop isn't very involved in Web 2.0 yet. It is a private place sometimes shared through Live Meeting or Go To My PC but collaboration from tools like Groove fell into a black hole at Microsoft. There were some tools that we have seen like Soonr and Foldershare that have been launched to start to make the PC more available on the net in the Web 2.0 world but neither has taken the world by storm just yet.
So our prediction here at Viapoint is that one of the next major stops for Web 2.0 is for the desktop computing environment to be easy to extend any type of item to be shared as a web page/link to peers or just accessed by the desktop owner over the web. So one initiative that we are working on as everyone else enjoys their holidays is to steer the Viapoint 2.0 product towards a more collaborative Web 2.0 model in order to bring the desktop and tagging on the desktop to the web. Any input, feedback, and thoughts from users is, as always, much appreciated.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Shopping information management (SIM)
With the holiday gift buying season in full gear and Internet shopping the best way to avoid getting trapped in a mall parking lot. But finding and organizing all of that shopping information can be a challenge with so much information available and the same product being available either retail or at lower cost auction, discount, or used product sites. I have always been a fan of the price comparison sites like pricegrabber and froogle but they generally add more options and not less for shopping. The folks at Intellext have an interesting solution in the newest release of their Watson sidebar that integrates with ebay and Amazon to provide searches for products while you shop on other web pages. It is similar to a move that Pluck had made last year to push content from Amazon, eBay, and shopping.com RSS search feeds into their RSS reader as a way to support the free reader. From what I can see a year later the Pluck people have downplayed that aspect relative to when the integrations were first made available.
The Viapoint Smart Organizer is a great tool for tracking your gift purchasing and holiday cheer sharing activities. If you have all your friends already added to a grouping you can add them to a grouping called "Holiday gifts 2005" to track which ones you have purchased presents for and which ones haven't. You can also organize your holiday gify buying research by collecting links for products that would be appropriate for each of your friends and family members and associate them with each person or groups of people. Since tracking gift giving doesn't require the Outlook adapter you can do it easily with the free non-registered version of Viapoint so please enjoy it if you are interested in doing so. We'll be tracking what is happening with the Intellext new free consumer release to see if it is worth adding more of the ultimate consumer features, things that help you buy stuff but there is room in everyone's stocking for the free version of Viapoint.
Happy Holidays and good luck shopping online or finding a strategic parking space at the mall.
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