Google Notebook Launches: Ho-Hum

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1. Sideath
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:03 am

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

2. Joe Anderson
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:12 am

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

3. quirkyalone
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:20 am

   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.

4. raul2010
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:21 am

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

5. Michael Arrington
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:21 am

   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.

6. quirkyalone
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:24 am

   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.

7. Ian McNaught
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:27 am

   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!

8. quirkyalone
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:29 am

   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.

9. bored
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 3:35 am

   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.

10. Andreas
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:36 am

    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!

11. Joe Anderson
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:38 am

    As said, it’s like Clipmarks.

12. quirkyalone
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:40 am

    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!

13. heraclyde
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:43 am

    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

14. Lelia Katherine Thomas
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:51 am

    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

15. Woodrow Jarvis Hill
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:52 am

    “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.)

16. Kevin
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 3:59 am

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

17. Troy
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:02 am

    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.

18. Daniel
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:03 am

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

19. quirkyalone
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:07 am

    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.

20. steve
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:11 am

    @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

21. steve
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:13 am

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

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

    Sorry

22. roopa
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:16 am

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

23. RBA
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:21 am

    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.

24. Huw
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:31 am

    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.

25. xxdesmus
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:32 am

    “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.

26. Michael M.
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:38 am

    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.

27. Judi Sohn
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:51 am

    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.

28. vincent
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:51 am

    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.

29. quirkyalone
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:54 am

    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.”

30. Robert Dewey
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:57 am

    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!

31. pj
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:08 am

    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.

32. torgeir
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:22 am

    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

33. John
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:28 am

    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.

34. John
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:31 am

    …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.

35. torgeir
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:44 am

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

    :torgeir

36. Joshua Porter
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:53 am

    “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.

37. John
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:54 am

    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

38. james
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 6:15 am

    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.

39. brenda
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 6:20 am

    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.

40. torgeir
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 6:32 am

    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

41. Ohad
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 6:41 am

    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

42. Ivan Pope
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 7:16 am

    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.

43. Rod Edwards
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 7:23 am

    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.

44. Lux
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    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.

45. wom
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 8:00 am

    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.

46. Erik
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 8:04 am

    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

47. mrshl
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 8:06 am

    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.

48. Dhiraj Gupta
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 8:48 am

    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

49. Sundroid
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 8:49 am

    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

50. Ali
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 9:06 am

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

51. Eric
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 9:07 am

    This isn’t a Del.icio.us competitor.

    Delicious is a straight bookmarking tool; this, as the name suggests, is a note-taking tool. There’s some overlap, but I see these as two distinct applications with two distinct uses. If anything it’s a competitor for Clipmarks/Spurl/Furl type sites which go beyond just bookmarking.

    I can see myself using this a lot when I’m researching a topic and want to collect information on it in one place; and using it a lot less when all I need to do is remember a URL.

    It’s a little feature sparse at the moment but every Google product starts out that way; I actually see a bright future for it if they start integrating it into some other services - Writely comes to mind. And on that note, it has the appearance of going head to head with a couple of Microsoft products rather than any of Yahoo’s acqusitions.

52. Chris Heuer
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 9:07 am

    Mike - you sure get a lot of traffic at 4am…

    While I can’t say much about the service yet without checking it out some more, I can tell you that this level of integration will go far towards gaining widespread adoption amongst the mass market. It won’t steal early adopters from Delicious, or librarians from Citeulike, but it will grab a huge chunk of the mainstream market from across the board. From what little I have seen, if they continue to iterate and improve, they could have snatched up a dominant position from any potential competitors within the space.

    Still, it feels to me that tagging and bookmarking is reliant upon shared communities with common interests, so a tool such as this Notebook offering from Google may get good numbers, but it does not automatically eradicate competition. If anything, this just raises the stakes for these people to get on the ball. Why hasn’t Yahoo! fully integrated Delicious yet is beyond me…

53. Rich McCue
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 9:18 am

    I see this more as an Onfolio competitor… which is a great research tool, but is windows only (http://www.onfolio.com). Onfolio was recently purchased by microsoft, and the software is now being given away for free, but for IE only (they don’t appear to be supporting Firefox any more). Onfolio does more than notebook currently, but it is not cross platform.

    I’m very interested in Notebook, as it allows me to capture and edit specific web page test, and have it stored as a specific snap shot in time of a particular web page. This is very useful and important for researchers. I’ll probably still use delicious for my general book marking though.

54. Steve Manfield
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 9:58 am

    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. It’s just that when Google introduces something, it gets a lot of virtual and actual ink.

55. Hari Mailvaganam
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 10:08 am

    Tad disapointed with Google Notebook. Like most of the posters, and TechCrunch, I was expecting it to allow tagging.

    It is interesting how Google Labs have different concepts of saving information in Gmail, Google bookmark and Google Notebook.

    Gmail does not have folders and uses labels….which is another way of saying tags

    Google bookmark is like any browser bookmark except available online. And folders are a necessicity to fully organise well. Sure there is search but the search is restricted to the bookmark - so if the bookmark is not descriptive tough. Tags would have been great addition. Plus better UI experience etc.

    Google Notebook is….well..have I seen this before. Yes, back in the bubble days there were tools like these offered. But they, of course, did not have firefox extensions. Google notebook is okay to have but it does not quite solve what users need.

    A merger of Google bookmark and norebook with some additional features will be great - like tagging, firefox extensions (bookmark is only available in the IE toolbar at the moment)

    It would seem that Google labs lack a central cohesive management repository where they can synch up on design methodology. Saying it is beta, does not cut it. Users will build a perception of the company on the sofware whether it has beta wrtten on it or nor. Gmail is great why is there such a challenge to follow through - surely it is not a deficit of talent.

56. Mave
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 10:14 am

    Google Notebook is not a direct competeitor of delicious.

    it is not a bookmarking web app.

    it is just what it says its is.

    I really like it. its very very useful.
    i obviously wont use it to bookmark pages, theres delicious for that.

    one will be disappointed if one thinks notebook will replace delicious. its not meant for that in the first place.

    A good and useful tool from google whose popularity and usage is beyond many of our imagination.

    its next big thing from google after gmail. just keep watching.

57. Wil Schroter
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 10:24 am

    How come whenever Google releases the tiniest, also-ran piece of functionality everybody acts as if they have split the atom?

    What’s next from the Google labs? The re-introduction of the blink tag? C’mon people, they are repackaging crap that was invented years ago and you keep pretending like it’s new!

    The only innovative thing Google ever did was create a sweet search engine and a great advertising tool (oh wait, they stole that from Overture).

58. sam
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 10:51 am

    It seems like someone has already tried to make this product (in somewhat google like UI)

    http://pmt-live.siteburg.com/loginpage.php

    this also offers flexibility of team management along with meebo support.

    The point I am making here is that even a small company can do more then this, there is no point in introducing crap service like this by google.

59. Michael @ SEOG
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 11:09 am

    Rich McCue — I agree with you, I also thought about it as an Onfolio competitor and mentioned the same idea in a blog post I made today. (http://seog.net/9)

    The biggest advantage I think it has over Onfolio is the fact that you are not limited to just one machine. There are so many times I’ve wanted to just grab a quick clipping while at work to examine closer at home but haven’t had the ability to do it. Its ultimately why I abandoned Onfolio (and other similar products) after testing it for a little while.

    Google Notebook may not be complete but its a great first start to me

60. Marcus Shepherd
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 11:13 am

    You shouldn’t be expecting something from Google Labs to NOT be half-finished. It says ” Google labs showcases a few of our favorite ideas that aren’t quite ready for prime time. Your feedback can help us improve them.”

61. dumbfounder
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 1:04 pm

    Wil, I think the greatest thing Google has done is to elevate their brand to a God-like status. They have done this by making things that are actually better than the competition though, I don’t know how long they can hold that status when they continue to release sub-par products like this.

62. Keen Been
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

    “I see little or no product vision coming out of Google”

    Eh?

    Gmail (and Gmail for your domain)
    plus
    Google Calendar
    plus
    Writley acquisition
    plus
    NoteBook

    equals

    MS Exchange and Sharepoint functionality… for free and probably better. The vision is to crush MS or at a minimum steal their small-business business.

63. John
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    There’s nothing “ho-hum” about this release. This product, Notebook, is intuitive, easy to use, and incredibly useful. I thank Google for it.

64. dusoft
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 1:59 pm

    I guess there is no need for tagging as they will use their search algorithms, so it’s same as searching at Google.

65. zaparotti
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

    oh god, this is the end of another shining industry; bye bye blinklist!

66. jr
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Meh,

    cheap rip-off of MyWeb2.0, which has been out for how long now?

    Seriously, folks, you want taggable, caching, shareable bookmarks on a mature platform? It’s been out there for a year, it’s free, and it works pretty darn well.

    http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com

67. Keith Dsouza
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 2:39 pm

    Micheal says

    “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.”

    Well my take on it is that every bloggers site has adsense on it, So whoever is responsible to make Google fat and arrogant is us, without adsense publishers google won’t be fat a**ed anyway.

    About the Google labs well, they say technically they are experimental places yet not ready for public usage, but whoever wants to use them can do that.

    I have seen on non labs products like Calendar getting critical acclaim and people trying everything to get into closed beta.

    So my point is crticize google and use them, that’s what the USP has been.

    Keith

68. Keith Dsouza
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 2:48 pm

    Another thing I wanted to add was that Google is an umbrella which provides you lots of products that are useful and maybe to some a privacy threat which i feel is not at all warranted when a product gives you an option to forgo or keep your privacy, the choice is always yours ultimately.

    All google products I have used till date have an option stating clearly to me that information of my usage will be shared, please choose if you dont want to do so, I have always thrown the privacy out of the window as it helps me better.

    So google will be there for sometime to come, just like when Microsoft came onto the scene and people started criticizing them but today 90% of softwares, games are made for Windows.

    Keith

69. James
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 5:08 pm

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

    Wow, I can’t believe that you’re saying that without any sense of irony.

    Anyway, I think Notebook is going to be hugely useful to me to the point of changing the way I work when I browse the web. It’s in no way a competitor to delicious; conceptually it’s totally different. I’m kind of startled that you can’t see that.

70. Phillip G
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 6:07 pm

    My personal opinion is that Google doesn’t really need tags (although it should have time stamping). They probably feel the search engine is powerful enough to find what your looking for in your bookmarks.

    Plus, how many of the people will REALLY use the tags? I think techies (like myself) use tags, but the normal web searcher will probably think copying and pasting some of the text in the article 9or whatever) is better.

    Pluck does this very well.
    http://www.pluck.com

    I’m still a little disapointed at most of the bookmark saving tools online. I’m still waiting for a combination of Pluck, Save This, and Yahoo Web 2.0 (AKA Delicious). I should have copy/paste comments, folders, tags, post to blog, email, and all around share with groups. MOST IMPORTANTLY, where are the group folders and permisions? Maybe I want Timmy to add stuff, Jane to read only and Bob to add and delete?

    Lets take this to the NEXT level.

71. dobby
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 6:48 pm

    This doesn’t sound like a delicious competitor at all. That would be a shareable google bookmarks. This is more a research tool.

72. tokjdm
    

    May 16th, 2006 at 8:16 pm

    The discussion as to whether GNote is a half-baked product or not is interesting. I find the product rather well done except for the fact that “note this” just saves a bookmark of the page and not its content (unless it’s highlighted) which I find clumsy. I would much prefer to have a quick way to decide whether I want to save just a bookmark or the whole page (but Scrapbook may be better at this job).
    The biggest disappointment by far is that GNote does not accept searches in other languages than English (I use Japanese). This is a significant departure from Google standards and difficult to understand, even fpr a beta product (the search functionality should already exist within Google).

73. Funana
    

    May 17th, 2006 at 12:38 am

    No! It’s definetly not like clipmarks.

    It is very very poor and ugly and doesnt compete to clipmarks! There are no features for what I use Clipmarks, that are implementet into Gnote.

    Forget GNote. If you don’t know Clipmarks, go there now and give it a try! You will never regret and forget. Get Clipmarks addicted. Now.

    Blessings,

    Funana

    http://rss.clipmarks.com/clipper/funana/

74. danofthenorthstar
    

    May 17th, 2006 at 1:38 am

    Google just wants to look like some “social open source company”. Indeed they want to create dependencies like any other profit-orientated organization. Using Google ist just like smoking cigarettes. At some point you’ll get addicted to it. And maybe you’ll be ready to pay for Google Notebook or something similar.

    Thanks

    Dan

    http://www.openvalley.de

75. drk
    

    May 17th, 2006 at 4:35 am

    No way am I transferring to this - I have all the online and offline tools that integrate very nicely to do this task - better.

    Using Foxylicous I can move my bookmarks from del.icio.us, I can cut and paste anything from my browser using Clippings Manageger extension and, of course the del.icio.us extrension supports tagging

    No tags in Google Notebook - I didn’t install the TagEditor extension for fun … and until Performancing plugin makes their tagging tool better I