Google Notebook: Another New Release (Soon)

Google Labs seem to be churning out products incessantly.. Recently, a Google employee named Erika Joy leaked out a couple of screenshots of their soon-to-be released product called Google Notebook, due for launch sometime next week at: http://www.google.com/notebook

It's supposed to be a tool that blows the living daylights out of the likes of del.icio.us. It's going to be a tool for gathering data from all around the web (bookmarks or actual content), nicely categorize them and add related metadata and finally publish it if you want. Looks like it's going to be a crossbreed of del.icio.us and digg.com.

The screenshots can be found at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/11/googl...k-screen-shots/

A funny article I found that points out how all Google products tend to be labelled "BETA" - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/index.php?p=102

 

 

 

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Could be interesting, I don't personally use those services but I'm sure for people who do it'll be nice having a google attempt at it. Google hasn't really dropped the ball yet when releasing new services as far as quality goes so... if they want to keep releasing them, fine by me

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Google Notebook is actually one of the four new products you mentioned in your previous topic. I don't remember where you mentioned it, but I remember seeing it as one of the four here.

Anyway, yeah, it looks like the best product out of their 4 recent ones. It'll make researching a lot easier. I just hope it won't be too complicated and overwhelming.
I wanna see some bigger screenshots... T_T

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Google Noteboox is HERE

I just gave it a shot and it seems a far more useful tool that it ever seemed to be.

They've even got this cool little extension for Firefox and IE, which creates a little button in your status-bar called Open/Close Notebook. You can use that to make a tiny box pop-up and then can go on a note-adding rampage.

The note addition proccess is really simply. You just select a whole bunch of text and/or graphics from any web-page and click on an Add Note button in that little popup and the content gets immediately added there as a note. The concept of labels is implemented here too - allowing you to easily categorize your added notes.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

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You can even maintain multiple notebooks and select any among them to facilitate further grouping.

There's an option called Full Page Preview in the extension, that takes you directly to the main site - with the same minimalistic UI as Gmail..


All in all a very good tool, I must say. Earlier on I used this tool called Local Website Archiver to save important info from pages or just single pages. But with that, there was always the problem of carrying the archive zip around. That's so totally gone now Hurraaaah !! Now all my code snippets can conveniently stay here and be accessible from anywhere in the world

Once again, it can be accessed at: http://www.google.com/notebook using your unified Google Accounts login/pass.

 

 

 

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To quote Red Green: "Everything is temporary, unless it works..."

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Wow, I didn't think Google was going to create a browser extension for this... It must have been hard to have to code the extension in both XUL for Firefox and .... IE for Internet Explorer... However, I thought they should have accomodated other browsers as well. When I tried to access it in Opera, it didn't give me a choice to skip the extension download, so I could only access the actual notebook after I downloaded the file. The extension also has its down side. If you're trying to access your notebook from a school or other public places, you'd be forced to go to the extension download page. That makes "accessing it from anywhere" harder than it has to be.

But other than that, Notebook has everything I expected it to have: The ease to add a new note; the intuitive design of the Notebook page; and source and date included in each note. But I think they could have added more details to the source and date part, by including the exact time and by trying to get more information about the source site.

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Before the advent of the Google Notebook, I was using a free utility called EverNote. It allows saving of formatted text, images and other multimedia content into different categories and can be searched by date, content and a neat timeline feature. An added advantage is that the data can be kept safe via encyption. Yet another plus point is the ability to lock certain articles so they can't be deleted accidentally. Nice features.

Works in both IE and Firefox.
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Google's attempt is good because it offers portability. I can use it from any machine where it's installed.

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Yeah, I have used Circus and Ponies Notebook for that kind of research. It is shareware, inexpensive to register. It stores text, outlines, multimedia, including voice annotations, and has a "clipping service" where you can store the selection in various marked places in different notebooks directly from the menu. It also imports images direct from your camera. It is integrated with Apple's Spotlight search engine and, in fact locates images better than Spotlight. I will often store images in Notebook just to get the better metadata search capability, especially for botanical images where the plants often have several valid names.

One thing Google will have trouble beating is that programs like Circus and Ponies Notebook or OmniOutliner can produce formatted PDFs, HTML, or a standard XML interchange format from your notebooks for publishing. Other services, like BackClip (site currently down) already offer web stored and organized bookmarks. The other major advantage of offline notebook applications, however, is that they can be accessed offline, emailed, or easily backed up. The fact that BackClip is currently down (at least from where I am), underscores this need.

I have close to a dozen different notebooks for various purposes and it is the only thing that lets me find anything when I need it. I do not see where Google's (Beta) product could come close to replacing a mature and inexpensive desktop application.




On the other hand, having just searched, there seem to be few to no good (and cheap) outliner programs available for Windows. I wonder why that is. I remeber there being a whole host of good PIM programs that had this capability. Where did they all go?

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As most of the people here will agree that it is a nice thing to have bookmarks stored online so that they can retrieved when ever required at any place. But with this also comes another issue of privacy. How can we be sure that they are not using the information stored on there servers for other purposes.
How about you storing your resume on writely or something like that and someone hacking into your account and using that information for malicious purposes. Though google is playing a great role in lives of people now a days by releasing new softwares but there is also increased risk of privacy being not maintained when placing bookmarks or documents online on some other person's server.

Do supply your comments.

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just a question
where do google get all it;s money from? i mean they have all these programmers and servers and stuff. is it just a old lonely rich guy pumping money into it or are they really getting that much money from googleads?

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