Last week, Google used their Press Day to announce a slew of new offerings, one of which – Google Notebook – rolls out today, in kind of a low key way. From the Google Blog: “If this sounds like something you’d like to try, you can find it here.” Ok, like, sure (shrug).
Last week, Google said it’d be “a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you’re searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others.” We said we’d have more once we saw it. We’ve seen it. There isn’t much more, but here’s what we got:
It’s a browser plug-in that works right now with IE and Firefox, and it’s almost exactly as described, kind of like a souped up version of Windows Notepad that can handle images…we’ve seen one blog post actually refer to Google Notebook as “Notepad,” and we’re not sure if they were joking. Once you’ve set it up, you can access your notes from any computer – even one without the plug-in installed – by logging in to your Google account. Others can access your notes if you choose to share them or make them public (this means, of course, that you’re sending all your clippings to Google for safekeeping).
For a Google product so unassuming, it’s provoking a wide range of reactions; the critical consensus seems to average out to lukewarm. Steve Rubel thinks it’s easy to use, but doesn’t like that it’s based on a browser plug-in, which decreases its functionality on “someone else’s computer,” a fair point. Michael Arrington points out Notebook’s lack of tagging capability in comparing it unfavorably to del.icio.us: “its unclear why Google doesn’t support this proven model for describing bookmarks.” Philipp Lenssen, on the other hand, seems pretty jazzed about it. In all, it seems like a basic application that’s doing pretty much what it says it would, but it’s not like Google is re-splitting the atom, here.
We’ve had a product that does what Notebook does and quite a bit more, called PreFound PFfinder out with our service since 1/17/06 and a product available that did similar things since 2001 called HydraLinks. And, PFfinder has tagging technology associated with it that allows for automated and user-generated tags. Onfolio and Pluck also have similiar offerings. It’s just that when Google introduces something, it gets a lot of virtual and actual ink.
Have you ever tried Clipmarks?
If you thought that the GNotes concept sounds nice, Clipmarks is the one you should use!
Let’s compare GNote to Clipmarks:
Here is what I see that Google’s new product does:
1) Creates a bookmark to the page that you were on when you did the notebook thing.
2) Takes whatever text you had highlighted at the time and makes that sorf of “your notes” about that page that is now bookmarked in their system.
3) Allows you then to go in and edit those notes to add your own text, or whatever. With a little html-like editor.
4) Allows you then to go in and look at all your notebook items in the typical Google ugly fashion.
5) No Tagging
6) No Community
Meanwhile, the Clipmarks featureset is completely different:
1) Allows you to clip many pieces from one site or page, or several sites or pages and make them together into ONE NEW PAGE.
2) Allows you to tag these entries for later search retrieval, sharing, networking, etc. Tagclouds help you to find interesting tags easily.
3) Allows you to then quickly and easily send those clippings into a set of “bookmarking” sites like Delicious, etc.
4) Provides an absolutely beautiful, fast, fabulous in every way UI to go and look at your clippings, search them, etc.
5) Provides a great commenting and popping system to foster actual social interaction around your clippings.
6) Provides a way to subscribe to an RSS feed for a tag or a person.
7) Provides a way to make Clips public or private.
Lets you subscribe to other Clipmarkers (“Follow”), to have a quick access to their Clipmarks.
9) Provides a print function that really rocks and let you print out pages which originaly can’t be printed well because of design errors. Due to the fact that you can clip content from different or multiple pages in one Clipmark, printing was never been easier.
10) All of this is completely integrated into your browser.
Go to http://clipmarks.com and test it! You will love it!