A bit more on Google Notebook
I’ve still not had as much time as I’d like to play with Google Notebook, but I have seen enough to form some opinions. In general, this is the first new google thingy in a while that has struck me as truly interesting. It is actually rather fun to play with.
I’ve seen a few articles around comparing Google Notebook to a social bookmark manager. (and speaking of bookmarking, i really should’ve saved ‘em so I could link ‘em here, eh?). I think they’re missing the mark completely. To me, GN feels a lot more like a direct competitor with the various wiki implementations. A wiki that can be private and for you only or one that you can construct before showing the world. And actually, it just hit me that it has a lot in common with Microsoft’s OneNote as well.
Google Notebook, wiki and OneNote all share some traits, don’t they? Loose or user-controlled organization. Gobs of flexibility. Ease of use and ease of text formatting. About the only edge OneNote has here would probably be that zany ability to build checklists that I loved so much before going back to paper. And even that is easily “simulated” with a wiki or GN. In the wiki at work I track a lot of my development tasks as bullet lists all starting with “[ ]“. When I finish the task, I go back and add an x to get “[x]“. Simple, easy and, for me, effective.
Ran into one minor snag. I installed the plugin on one of the home machines last night and played around a bit. Then this morning I wanted to install the plugin on my work machine. However, when I went to the Google Notebook site it saw me as already logged in. And when you’re logged in you can’t, as far as I know, find a link for the browser extension! After futzing around for 5 minutes it finally dawned on me that maybe I should sign out. 30 seconds later I had the download link and was logged back in. Of course I was working with the same set of notebooks as I was at home.
So yeah, first impression? Rather nifty and potentially quite useful. Now to sort out if wiki, GN or OneNote is the way to go… or more paper?
Possibly Related posts:
- A New Way to Access Google Notebook
- Google Notebook
- Zoho Notebook Goes Beta
- Early Thoughts on Zoho Notebook
- Zoho’s Latest — Notebook
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2 Responses to “A bit more on Google Notebook”
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Flair and Sparklies
Well..to me the notebook looks like one of the products that Google could have definitely avoided..!!
APart from feature-poor product, its buggy too.!!
More here..
http://sinha.wordpress.com/2006/05/17/google-notebook-id-rather-not-note-this/
Fortunately, I haven’t hit the bugs you’ve noted.
And I agree (and wrote) that I don’t see this as anything useful for bookmark managing. But I think it has great potential as a “notepad”. I dunno that I have much intention of sharing stuff, although I just realized a public notebook FAQ for a project I work on might be interesting…