Google Notebook

Finally an interesting service from Google after a long time (by their usual standards).

Google Labs has just released Google Notebook.

The blurb on the overview page says:

Google Notebook makes web research of all kinds – from planning a vacation to researching a school paper to buying a car – easier and more efficient by enabling you to clip and gather information even while you're browsing the web.

And since Google Notebook lives in your browser, you won't be left with a scattered collection of notes, Word docs, and browser bookmarks to sort through; all your web findings will be gathering into one organized, easy accessible location that you can access from any computer.

What can one do with Google Notebook?

At its most simplest, Google Notebook is a nifty tool to assemble and organize reference material and then access it across computers or share it with others.

Google Notebook allows one to click and save items of use and interest that one might come across while browsing or researching on the web. Google Notebook, unlike a service like Del.icio.us, also allows users to clip and save graphics along with the text and the URL. And unlike Del.icio.us, or other social bookmarking tools, there's no provision of tagging.

A user can create multiple Notebooks and then save and organize information from web pages in them with hardly any effort. The notes can be organized under various user defined sections.

Google Notebook uses AJAX allowing users to easily drag and drop notes from one notebook to another. The notebook can also be printed.

By default all notebooks are private, but they can be made public as well. Users can search public notebooks.

I feel Google Notebook will be useful for keeping a list of things I want to post about. It can also become an online version of favorites/bookmarks. And of course, one can use it to collate links and text while researching online. The public notebooks can possibly become something similar to wikis especially for a group. I think an organization/group of people may find Google Notebook to b a neat way of sharing information. Student study groups, teachers, and people working together on a project will find Google Notebook potentially useful.

Technorati Tag(s): Google, Google Notebook