Content Matters

Now that Google Notebook is live, I thought I'd take it for a quick spin.

My initial feedback: it's rather underwhelming.

Google Notebook is designed as a bookmarking replacement - in essence it's Google's response to delicious, which of course was acquired by Yahoo last December.  Like Delicious, Google Notebook allows the user to select web pages, annotate them and store them for retrieval at a later time.  Also, like Delicious, Google Notebook can be private or shared with others.

Google notebook is a browser plugin.  From any web page you can simply right-click, then select "note this" to create an entry for that page.  From there, you simply type in your comments about that page.

True to its name, Google Notebook uses a notebook metaphor (the kind you write in, not the kind you type into) for storing these annotated sites.

Unlike Delicious, Google Notebook does not use tags.  Rather than assigning tags to the pages, you enter text about them, then you can create section headings for various topics, and organize the notes into the sections.

One benefit is that if you highlight text passages, Google Notebook will automatically grab them and paste them into your note.  This makes it more of a researcher help than strictly a bookmarking tool.  In that sense, one might look at Google Notebook as a competitor to NetSnippets rather than Delicious.

Here, in full screen mode, you can see how the notebook page looks.
The interface is clean (as you'd expect from Google) and they've got a nice ajax-based drag and drop capability to move your notes around.  The page is search-driven, so you can search your own notebooks or public notebooks for whatever you're seeking.

As with most Google Labs offerings, Google Notebook at first blush is uninspiring.  While it's a potentially useful research assistant, the lack of tagging limits its usefulness from a social software perspective.  True annotation seems to be a very niche product and it would seem that Google would much prefer to go after the wide audience that Delicious has established.  Perhaps it will get there in the next phase, as it seems pretty easy to add tags to what they've already delivered.  In the meantime, Google Notebook is a simple offering that users might find useful but is unlikely to inspire  raving fans the way Delicious has.

For more feedback on Google Notebook, take a look at TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch and GoogleTutor.