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.

Comments

[Funana]

10 Facts why you should use Clipmarks instead of GNote

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.

8) 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!

[KristenJo]

I agree that the plugin is just "OK". I played with it a little, but deleted it, because Clipmarks is where it's at. I like being able to log into Clipmarks and see my clips from any computer (I move around a lot), and I'm not so much concerned with a personal diary type system as with being able to get other people's input, etc. I love me some Clipmarks.

[Bora Oren]

Flipping screens, moving screen... blah. When do they come up with a screen-only with a virtual keyboard. Just the screen...
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