This is interesting… I think I might check it out. Can it really defeat del.icio.us?

No, not a del.icio.us competitor. It sounds identical to Clipmarks, as I said here.

Good question Sideath!

After playing with Notepad for a while, this very question poped up in my head: Will this replace del.icio.us? Or will I use both? Or will I stay with del.icio.us?

My current opinion is, that it may replace del.icio.us, but they would need to add tagging and time-stamping. Because in most cases, I just need to see my latest bookmarks. Anyway, I am curious to see which one will win for me.

So what about http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ then? Google seems to be starting lots of projects lately and never really finishing them.

I personally don’t see this stealing customers from delicious. Of course, the vast majority of web users are not delicious users - there are lots of new customers to grab.

Joe,
Google Notepad is indeed a del.icio.us competitor, in the sense that one can use either of them for the task of “remembering web stuff”. The feature set is different, but they are trying to solve the same problem - from this point of view they are competitors.

I don’t see this as a delicious competitor - I can see myself using both for different purposes. I use delicious purely as a bookmarking service. This is much more for making a note of text that you may want to come back to later - ideally I guess both services could be combined into one, but whilst I can see myself using google notes a lot, I don’t invisage my delicious usage declining!

Sorry, I meant to say Notebook, not Notepad! Michael, I think this app may steal customers from del.icio.us, since it is not dificult to expand the functionality of Notebook to match del.icio.us.

Its a combination of del.icio.us and clipmarks (and furl, spurl, etc). It doesn’t seem to store copies of web pages or store bookmarks that easily. The lack of tagging is a big negative. But the popup that shows up in the bottom right of the browser when you “note” something is kinda nice.

Perfect tool! Now I have one tool to store my bookmarks, images and text snippets. Delicious is nice - but only stores bookmarks - so this is a total different product. I like it!

As said, it’s like Clipmarks.

bored,
It can store bookmarks as easily as del.icio.us - when you are browsing with mini-notebook open, you just select anything on the browsed page and then push “Add note” in the Notebook window, and the bookmark is saved. This is no more difficult as to click del.icio.us bookmarklet!

I totally disagree with the ones saying “google notebook” is a “del.icio.us” competitor !
…i’d rather think “google notebook” is simply a `delicious` google app ; )

i have been using del.icio.us (wich is great) for a while and i have been looking for a web tool wich would allow me to store quick notes, content clips, brief ideas easily… just like google notebook does !

i think these two apps are trully user-compatible, wether google bookmarks looks totaly irrelevent for me.

i think i will keep my way on : bookmarks on del.icio.us, ideas on google notebook

This definitely won’t stop me from using del.icio.us to store my links, but Notebook looks promising for logging ideas, as heraclyde said. However, like a lot of social networking things, even del.icio.us, I risk information overload for myself. Dammit. Need a bigger brain… :p

“Google Labs is littered with half baked and half finished products. I see little or no product vision coming out of Google, sitting fat and arrogant on it its Adsense revenues.”

Michael,

It seems to me that Google’s intent is NOT to monetize everything they do. Some items, like Gmail, yes, but a lot of the stuff under the “google labs” moniker seems to be more about “pure R&D” than anything like a “real” product.
In other words, these products are more like concept cars than anything that might go into production. Having said that, the deal with the ‘net and “constant beta” is that, if the product hits a bone with the public, they can amend and revamp to their heart’s content. This is what’s missing from a lot of modern companies, in my opinion: the equivalent of a Bell Labs, or even the weird grants DARPA used to (still does?) give out.

There may be a “game plan”, but every project Google “puts out” may not be part of that plan. And I think, at this point in their “life”, it’s a healthy idea for Google to keep balancing their solid revenue streams with low-cost “pie-in-the-sky” projects.

(Disclaimer: I don’t work for, nor make any money off Google, nor does anyone I know directly.)

I like it. Sure there may be other like sites, but I still like it. Nice Ajax use.

Tags are NOT needed when you have CONTENT.

del.icio.us is so overhyped. furl and spurl have always been better.
They *cache* your pages so you can search through them.

And guess what? once you have a *cache* of the pages you’ve visited, you DON’T need tags, which are also overrated.

You guys need to ditch del.icio.us and try furl, clipmarks, Evernet, Net snippets, and now Google Notebook.

You’ll see that once you have content and a good search engine, tags can go to hell.

del.icio.us is not a competitor. It’s an antiquated tool.

For some reason it made my Firefox go bananas.
Had to un-install.
Possibly a conflict with other extensions…

Troy,
It depends of which kind of sites you are visiting and how you want to remember them. For example, I tried both furl and spurl, and they were less useful as del.icio.us FOR ME. Also, caching is not that usefull for me, since a lot of times, I am tagging websites which primarily provide some services, not content. So I’d say your remarks a bit absolute and not fitting to everyone’s situation.

@Troy

Tags do not replace content they improve organization. A concept that GMail has elegantly illustrated. Its powerful to tag (label) sites or emails with several labels instead of the Web 1.0 way of using folders.

Frankly amazing that Google have excluded this functionality.

FWIW the Notebook discussion forum is becoming littered with people making this very point.

Strangely Google Bookmarks does use labeling … and yes you can add Notes to Google Bookmarks. But no neat FF extension.

Clearly these two groups sit on opposite sides of the office building.

Maybe they will have lunch and merge?

Separately they will add an API to allow people to improve (ok add) integration with Gmail, Calendar, etc, etc

I mistakenly said: “Separately they will add …..”

Sorry I meant: Separately ***hopefully*** they will add an API

Sorry

and so it adds to googles idea of social community… i think its pretty cool this. especially being able to add images… nice touch!

I find interesting everyone’s talking about whether this is a del.icio.us competitor or not. The market is out of del.icio.us, not in it. How many active users does del.icio.us have? When they were acquired by Yahoo the total number was about 300.000. What is that? Nothing. Let’s not talk about the technology behind it either…

I don’t know why Yahoo acquired del.icio.us if it wasn’t to continue their quest for being “cool” again (they’re doing a terrific job at that - Microsoft could learn a thing or two from them). But in the same line, I wouldn’t understand it if they had been acquired by Google either.

As for Google Notebook, I don’t like it. I’m not sure why, but the first impression wasn’t like something I’d use.

The reason Google doesn’t have any tag functionality is that they don’t feel they need it. Even Gmail only provides tags (labels) as an afterthought, that you can use if you want. I have found them largely unnecessary, as the search function works extremely well. I think Google wants to move away from tags, towards text analysis. This is a good approach in the long run as, whilst we are not yet at the stage for text analysis to be as fully effective as tags, it offers an infinitely greater potential at much less bother to the user. So I think Google’s got it right in this case.

“I also wonder about Google’s dedication to its own projects. For example, what will be the fate of Google Bookmarks now that Google Notepad has launched? Google Labs is littered with half baked and half finished products. I see little or no product vision coming out of Google, sitting fat and arrogant on it its Adsense revenues.”

I could not have said it any better my friend. Half-baked products that only do well because it happens to have the Google name on it …it’s sad really.

Well I’ve only just taken a brief spin of both Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook, but it seems to me that these are complimentary rather than competing services. “Bookmarks” is just that — an online repository for your browser bookmarks. You can’t do a whole lot more with it, and that’s where “Notebook” comes in. It’s kind of like Google took del.icio.us and split it into two — one service purely for keeping a list of websites you don’t want to lose track of; the other for organizing things you find online in ways you might find useful (research topics, travel or event planning, wishlists, etc.). To me, it seems like a great idea. For instance, I’ve always had trouble using del.icio.us as a mechanism for organizing useful tech support websites, blog posts, forum posts, tips-and-tricks-snippets, and so on. The del.icio.us layout just isn’t full featured enough for me to zero in on the data that is really useful and filter out the stuff that isn’t. Google Notebook looks like it would be much better suited for keeping and organizing clips of the data I really want to save. That doesn’t preclude also using del.icio.us, but as long as I’m at Google anyway I’d probably end up using its Bookmark service also and dropping del.icio.us altogether. So I dunno, Mike, but I think this really could give del.icio.us a run for its money … er, Yahoo’s money. Having ideas like this in the pipeline is probably why they didn’t bother buying del.icio.us, and I’m not sure I agree with you that they made the wrong decision.

I don’t see Google Notebook as a del.icio.us competitor at all. I think it’s competition for any of the note-taking apps that are online, or Evernote/OneNote that are offline. I see no relation to del.ico.us other than the ability to make notes public and search other public notes.

Yeah.
I also think that it is not a competitor of delicious because of lacking tag, however it is ture that scrapbook will face a huge problem.

xxdesmus,
But Google Labs *is supposed* to be a repository for halfbacked products! From their site: “Google labs showcases a few of our favorite ideas that aren’t quite ready for prime time.”

Half-baked and half-finished? I completely agree. I am quickly losing faith in Google… Will we see the “Netscape” effect when Windows Vista rolls out and is somehow “integrated” with MSN search?

Hell, I’m still waiting for this “eBay killer” that was supposed to come out from Google Base… Or was it Microsoft Live Expo? LOL!

Simple, easy to use and single creds shared with gmail. This is a good thing for Google to release. It lacks a few fundamental features such as export but fundamentally this is very useful.

As a long time user of MS OneNote (which I think is superb), Google Notebook is similar to the Side Note function in OneNote. The advantage is that it’s held on the web and I can deal with and use the notes from any computer with no sync required.

Irrespective of Googles reasons to release this tool it is one of best things to come out of the labs. Long way it thrive.

i’m fine with the fact that it’s a half-way-there product, but there’s 3 things that are really bugging me…

1) it’s missing a feature to make notes available to people of my own choice like i can in google analytics

2) and where’s the quick link to it in the link menu in gmail, and when i’m on that - what’s up with the stupid opening of these links inn a new tab/window instead of just resuing the tab/window som we can switch between them (this is really a mayor usabilltiy issue…)

3) links re-use the active tab/window

i’m also looking forward to integration with maps & earth

:torgeir

Wrong! This is NOT a del.icio.us competitor. This is a MS Word competitor. Yes, you CAN clip web pages and links, but you can add typed content to your heart’s content.

…or a OneNote competitor like someone said above. Actually, OneNote makes more sense… it even looks like one note. Oh, and the auto-save when you click outside of the text-editing area is just brilliant.

i don’t agree that it’s a word competitor, but when they’ve finshed integrating writely it just might be…

:torgeir

“I see little or no product vision coming out of Google, sitting fat and arrogant on it its Adsense revenues.”

Arrogance and Adsense have nothing to do with it, Mike. Design, contrary to popular belief, is really hard. You can’t just go out and design a Google Calendar any time you feel like it.

It’s useful, I just wish there was a Save/Export option
Hoping for a few more bells and whistles by the time it leaves the Lab

That labs products are half baked does not matter too much as it is part of google’s payback to their staff’s participation. It’s peer production initiated projects that deserve a launch from within the googleplex, as individuals there are respected with an exciting and open vision into which they can plugin their own personal projects, and receive resources and time to work on them. I guess some projects will just die and others succeed.

I use delicious but have never been blown away by it, just found it better than alternatives. This seems like the same thing - not incredible. Gugly again, as usual, for one thing, but so is delicious and so if I get past that and decide I do want to switch to this, I then face the (probably final) obstacle of no “import existing bookmarks.”

On another note (ha ha), how come no one’s mentioned esnips in the comments. I’ve really been enjoying that.

just discovered a mayor issue that i probably should have noticed for the begiing…

it only works wtih firefox & ie and i really hope they do something about this at lightning speed, it’s now impossible to use notebook with opera mini 2 on a mobile phone and accesing notebook on the go would really make it a beatifull service…

i can get past the initiall download page by typing in the full url (google.com/notebook/fullpage) but it just hanges there trying to load the notebook content…

so please notebook team, support opera mini 2, and when you’re first at it do the right thing and use open standards and make it crossbrowser!

:torgeir

I am using del.icio.us as my primary bookmarking tool and while I think it has a lot of room for improvement, I don’t see google overtaking it any time soon

Tell ya, Google’s problem is that it hires people on the promise of the 80/20 rule - they get to use 20% of their time on their own projects. Well, there must be tens of thousands of projects in Google, and some of them have to be released to the world - or what is the point of the 80/20 rule (i.e. you end up with lots of unhappy developers). But, what is a ‘project’ without some sort of financial discipline, some sort of business planning and raison d’etre? So you get a stream of 80/20 projects getting out the door without even the desire to build any of the supporting infrastructure that startups have to grapple with.
I mean, I’m guessing here :-), but Google seems to me sometimes like the worst 1.0 incubator that you could imagine.

Does Google have a CEO setting corporate goals / vision for them? Their product arm certainly doesn’t act like they’re working towards any common goal.

Is not true that tagging is not supported. You only need to type any keywords or tags inside your note, then the powerful search engine will find your tag words pertaining the appropiated notes.

What I don’t like is not being able to make private or public individual notes, not a whole notebook, and not being able to email individual notes, for the same reason (the share option only works for notebooks, not notes).

Also this service should be integrated to Google Calendar, and notes should have a date and time stamp automatically once saved or edited.

I’m loving Google Notebook, I got the Firefox extension to use with it and it’s great. I can organize all I wanna save on the web easily.

So far I like the idea of notebook but I cant seem to install the FF extension on multiple systems. The link to the download dissapears after installing it on the first system

I don’t really see this as similar to del.icio.us at all. It seems more like a light version of OneNote for the Web (or Evernote). I can see it excelling in this small space. And with the fast search integrated into the design, it seems even more useful. As much as I like tags (and as useful as they are when sharing) when you get search results in .002 seconds, you don’t really need tags when you’re searching your own notebook.

But I think the people saying tags are overrated are missing an important point. Tags are a community feature. What’s useful about them is looking at someone’s tags or “tag cloud” and seeing if their interests mirror your own. If they do, then you can search their bookmarks like you used to search someone’s napster files. Tags are an integral part of building a community. To the extent that google wants to accomplish that, tags would be an important feature connecting users to each other. Notebook, though, is a powerful first-person app. It’s far from ho-hum.

I think Google Notebook sucks.

Sucks so much that I went ahead and wrote a whole review about it.

Here: http://www.dhirajgupta.com/Hom.....sucks.aspx

I actually found a good use for Google Notebook.

I create video clips and post them on Google Video. Some are more popular than others, so I “clipped” the popular ones and put them in a notebook and name it “Selected Videos”, which actually looks nice and clean.

Here is an idea — anyone can group together his/her favorite TechCrunch posts, put them in a Google Notebook, and call it “TechCrunch Greatest Hits”, or whatever.

By the way, if you make your Google Notebook “public”, you get a web address for it and everybody gets to view it. Here is mine:

http://www.google.com/notebook.....oQgfO_77Mh

Google ALL BETA - “fat and arrogant” as you said it in your post