Yesterday Google released their Desktop 2.0 which does not only the local searching of email and files, it also has a nifty “sidebar” system which allows you to use plugins to show everything from your adsense profits, latest email, latest news, weather, system stats, etc. I’m not 100% convinced that this sidebar system will be any better than the proposed Longhorn sidebar. I’ve got it up with a few plugins though, and am giving it a fair shot.
As Robert notes, google is calling RSS feeds “web clips”, and I found the way that they do their implementation very slick. Basically it’s a mini news aggregator that you don’t have to add feeds to. I was looking at it a few minutes ago and noticed that feeds from one of the websites I visited were showing up. Looking at the expanded view I found that it was automatically picking up feeds from pages I’d surfed to!
I had checked “automatically add commonly viewed clips”, thinking it would add popular sites that other people had chosen. Going into there now I see that it’s got a pop up with a list of all the recent pages I’ve visited with the option to add these, and others were already added (not sure what the requirements are to have them automatically).
Very cool! Google gets it right nicely again. I don’t want to have to add all my RSS feeds by hand, or remember to add the ones I view, or import and export an OMPL file.