Is Google Notebook a del.icio.us competitor?

Published on 5/16/2006 in Blogging, Hacks, Productivity, Reviews and Web 2.0. View Comments Tags: .

Google Notebook works on Macs!
Despite warnings, Google Notebook works with Firefox for Mac without any issue

Techcrunch thinks Google Notebook is a direct competitor to del.icio.us. Being a hard-core del.icio.us user, I think it hardly comes close. Granted, Steve Rubel mentioned how the Google Notebook interface itself is very straightforward: You create a notebook. Each notebook can feature rich text notes. You then have the option to print or share notebooks. All of your notebooks are naturally searchable. So to me, Google Notebook is more like an online clipboard (requiring a plugin to work).

I think that Del.icio.us is still essential because:

1. Folksonomy-based tagging rocks!
Google Notebook lets you search for bookmarks using traditional note description as the search index. Del.icio.us lets you do that, plus browse for what you want via tags… more tactile in a “berrypicking” way.

2. del.icio.us is more socially-oriented
Sure, Google Notebook lets you search public notebooks, but you won’t know what you want unless you know it before. Looking at the del.icio.us homepage, you’ll see a natural popularity list of cool bookmarks organized by tags waiting for you to discover. If your blog post gets listed there, your traffic soars!

3. del.icio.us has API driven apps
There are tons of web apps out there taking advantage of del.icio.us. I blogged about the daily del.icio.us posting hack which is pretty popular here, while others have written apps to take advantage of quick bookmark posting (e.g. Pukka)

In Conclusion
I see both bookmarking services serving different purposes. Google Notebook is more purpose (and intuitively) driven allowing you to create sets of bookmarks according to your needs. Del.icio.us is more like the swiss-army knife of bookmarking, allowing you to repurpose it according to your creative use of tags (e.g. toread, 16MayVacation). Do share your thoughts!





  • Google isn't doing anything new or even interesting. Logging your own interests and comments only goes so far...beyond that, there's Clipmarks.
  • 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!
  • Steve: Some reviews compared Google Notebook to a popular Firefox scrapbook extension as well. I fee your pain buddy.

    3spots: That's a great comparison of social bookmarking services. There's a whole lot out there, and I'm just in disagreement on how Michael of TechCrunch compared Google's offering with del.icio.us. I think they are as different as Apples and Oranges.
  • We've had a product that does what Notebook does and quite a bit more, called PreFound PFfinder out with our service since 1/17/06 and a product available that did similar things since 2001 called HydraLinks. And, PFfinder has tagging technology associated with it that allows for automated and user-generated tags. Onfolio and Pluck also have similiar offerings. It's just that when Google introduces something, it gets a lot of virtual and actual ink.
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