Google Notebook Review - 2/5

I just tried Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook) for the first time--downloaded the client, browsed around a bit, notebooked a few items, rearranged them.

On current merits, I give this a 1/5.  The browser plugin is just "OK", I don't know how much I'll actually use it to bookmark things since I'm pretty judicious with bookmarking anyway.  It is, however, nice to have the notebook available in the browser at any time, that got it one point.

The other point in the 2 of 5 comes from potential.  As I explained in an earlier post, I think Google could be a big player in the Microformat space with this product if they finally decide to play nicely with emerging standards.  If they don't, this will probably be another "half baked and half finished product", as Mike Arrington put it.  He also has a more in-depth review of the functionality and explains why it can't stand up to Del.icio.us yet.

Is it just me, or are Google's new product releases becoming less ground breaking and more derivative?  Their key differentiator is their enormous distributed infrastructure, the last product that I can recall taking full advantage of that is GMail.