Google desktop’s sidebar may hamper your productivity

As Sibu has observed, this is not a good move. I installed the Google Desktop 2.0 (GD) including the sidebar. As Brad Hill says, it takes up a lot of real estate (yes, i am aware of the auto-hide feature).  More importantly, when it is on, photos from your hard disk appear, news articles appear and whatever else happens depending on the plug-ins. As I pointed out earlier about My Yahoo, these sort of interrupts affect your productivity. It will really help if Nikhil Bhatla, GD Product Manager, read this brilliant article in the IEEE Software Magazine about the impact of interrupts on your productivity (Via Interruptions.net, an organization focused on the positive and negative effects of interrupts).

P.S. I love the Google Desktop search index for your desktop. It is a phenomenal tool. More on this later.