Google Notebook Review

Google Notebooks mentioned in Google Press Day is now live (signup here). The cliff notes version of Google notebooks is think of it as a javascript collection of word processing documents (makes the writely purchase make a lot of sense now).

After signing in downloading, the firefox extention, and restarting you’ll notice a new icon on your status bar

If you’re not signed into your google account clicking on the “open notebook” text launches the sign-in screen

Once you are signed in clicking on the “open notebook” gives you some instruction to get things moving quickly and without much trouble.

Let’s start working with it, let’s say I was going to Chicago and wanted to get some airline fares. I head off to expedia and put in the information and get three results I’m happy with, but have to save to show the person who’s travelling with me, so I highlight the text, click the “open notebook” text and the little window pop’s up I wan’t to click the “add note” link.

You’ll see the pop-up window change to include some of the information

While I’m in Chicago I also want to get some deep dish pizza so I find a restaurant I like but I’m not familiar with the area so I’ll save all of the locations to my notebook

Let’s look at what we’ve saved in the full browser window by choosing it from the “actions” sub menu

I’ve collapsed everything in the view below to make it easy to read, but all of the information is there and to expand it all you need to do is click the arrows next to each listing

While my sample only has two bits of data it’s easy to see how you could get a lot of information like airline, hotels, dining options, places to visit and so on. So to make it easier to manage you can break things up into sections. Over on the right under the action menu we’re going to click “add section heading”, and add two headings “airline” and “dining”.

Grabbing the “bar” next to each listing we can drag each item into a sub category

To clean things up a little more we’ll rename our notebook

Here’s what we end up with

You can set up multiple notebooks for multiple categories of things, such as trips, vacations, client jobs, projects, parties, pretty much anything you’d want to make a list for or write down on a piece of paper. By default your list is private however you can mark it public

Here’s my chicago notebook example. Something to take note of, it puts a link to the URL where the data came from.

After playing with this a little if you make a notebook public it’s very similar to squidoo. It will be interesting to see how many phentermine, mortgage, and casino notebooks start popping up over the next few weeks. Keeping your notebooks private makes them very similar to writeboards. They are much more functional and easy to use than a writeboard, but lack the collaborative aspect of a writeboard. If you use writeboard with any of the other basecamp projects it won’t have enough functionality for you to be useful. I actually like Google notebooks and find them pretty useful, however the privacy aspect really scares me. I know once on Google’s servers this data is going to live forever even if I delete it, something I’m not entirely comfortable with.

However I actually like this product, I’d like to see it merged with Google Calendar and GMail. I know there are some add-on hacks for to-do lists but c’mon Google how hard can that be to add in?

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5 Responses to “Google Notebook Review”

1. Matt Cutts Says:
   May 16th, 2006 at 11:21 am

   Dude, nice overview. I like that it preserves the HTML pretty well; I’ve been sticking simple stuff in mine.

2. Administrator Says:
   May 16th, 2006 at 11:26 am

   Thanks, I had to work through breakfast to get it up.

3. Hawaii SEO Says:
   May 16th, 2006 at 2:05 pm

   Great post! I’ll check it out today.
   Are you in the travel industry? Just wondering.

4. Administrator Says:
   May 16th, 2006 at 2:17 pm

   I have a travel ebook I sell, and two disney travel sites in development. I also have a local client who I’ve just started with. They actually have a .travel domain name, which surprisingly tends to throw a lot of errors on email submission forms.

5. Graydon Says:
   July 8th, 2006 at 12:57 am

   What, no speculation on how Google could use this along with Bookmarks to include the searching functions and what that implies for SEO?

   For the record, I find it works great for recipe clippings… no more logging into various sites to see what I saved… and no more printing them out and losing it.