The big question is going to be whether Google Desktop remains valuable once Vista comes out. Vista has widgets and search, so why would anyone get Gdesktop? Google needs to do some more innovating.

Because not everybody will jump on the Vista train right from the beginning?

Microsoft teams up with Yahoo and has even more widgets.

I have to say I hate Yahoo Widgets. Its very Resource intensive.

As a web developer what I need are low resource consuming applications that help me increase productivity!

Google Desktop Does this. Mines has a remote for Itunes, my Google Talk & Quick Launch Widget.

Quick Launch is directly linked to my Apache Server.

I can easily manage content with little or no ease. Not only that, the icons I have setup inside , and the colored folders application come up inside quick launch.

Even though its not a very productive system yet as I see some system lag in it, it is a step in the right direction.

And Huw Is right. Yes this a good application for now. But in terms in long term investment it is horribly wasted. You have to realize Ralph that yes for now while pc’s still ahve Windows XP Google Desktop will be useful. But in 5 years it may very well be dead.

And what happens then? All that money spent to invest in the product? Will there be layoffs? Or will Google Join Yahoo to produce widgets for Vista?

I just shit-canned Gdesktops too. I got sick of it crashing all the time trying to use the gdRSS module and weather module. I moved to Yahoo! widgets and am fairly impressed. This is the first time I have seen yahoo out-do google at something. The widgets are much slicker, and much more configurable, plus there are like 100 times more. I also tried klipolio but didn’t like that much either. As well as desktop sidebar. I used to roll with desktop sidebar(not the google one) a while ago (couple years) and it seem there haven’t been much improvements. You can bet your sweet ass the widgets are coming though, good ole’ web2.0 for ya.

To respond about the yahoo widgets.
I currently have picture frame, clock, CPU monitor, weather, and RSS ticker running. I have Mozilla with 7 tabs open, winamp, SQL Enterprise manager, SQL query analyzer, another program, VB develop v. 6 open with a program compiled and running. and PSI, truecrypt, and gmail notifier running in my system tray. My CPU is staying around 20% usage on average. I have a 2Ghz, 512Mb ram. I am by far no google basher. I use gmail, reader, calendar, analytics, base, (used to use blogger, now wordpress), co-op, earth, froogle, earth, notebook, video, trends, and spreadsheets. I am pretty much a google whore, but like I mentioned earlier, this is the first time I have seen yahoo beat out google at something. And the widgets run faster for me than the desktop did, as well as take up less of my desktop real estate. So instead I use widgets to access my google services. The google calender widget is quite slick.

How About We Get A Reading of Your Memory Usage. Once you see how much memory Yahoo uses you shall be astounded. =)

Yahoo! has a big head start in the “Widget” dept. … Yahoo! bought out “Konfabulator” which has existed for years and turned it into “Yahoo! Widgets” They had good stability and fast load times (actually a bit faster) before Yahoo! came into play. I use Yahoo! Widgets because I was a previous Konfabulator user and just migrated over. I’ve used Google Desktop before but found it to be a bit resource intensive and didn’t like the “sidebar” environment. I prefer tools that I can move around as my needs change.

Cool, I’ll try and aim for the $5000 in the contest like that I can atleast take home the T-shirt :).

But its starting to get better, second Google Product to get out of beta

Opera widgets are cool.

I truly second opera!

Wait! Since we did we care about opera …… =/ …. Ok One thing I like about Yahoo Widgets over Google is the Mac Like Over View Display

My yahoo widget’s are only using 5.9Mb of mem. I don’t know what google desktop was using, don’t feel like re-installing it to find out. Google desktop also has other processes running. GoogleDesktopDisplay, GoogleIndexer, etc. So the widget’s may outperform GD in mem usage as well. I do agree that I enjoy the slick look as well. I like that they support transparency as well, I can have my cpu/mem usage displayed very discretely in the corner of the screen. I realized too that I don’t really need to have desktop search. I organize my files pretty well and don’t really know what kind of stuff google is doing with that info, espically since the government has been requesting all that information from google.

So, who won the contest? any news about it? speaking of gadgets I also found this site the Widgets and Gadgets it also features the latest and hottest gadgets nowadays.

Is it ok?