10 Feature Requests For Google Notebook

Dear Google Notebook team,

I used Google Notebook from the first day you launched it and I liked it. I even created notes to help me with my blog posts. But I have some small request for you.

1. export notes as PDF files
2. images should be cached on Google servers (at least as thumbnails if it's a copyright issue, or even as files from Google Image Search cache)
3. gadgets for Personalized Homepage and Google Desktop
4. share a private notebook with your Gmail contacts, or only with some people
5. integrate Google Notebook with Google Calendar, so you can show notes from events
6. upload documents (.doc, .pdf, .xls) and images
7. notes should be searchable from Google Desktop and Gmail
8. a version optimized for mobile phones
9. original text should be differentiated from annotations
10. integrate Notebook with Google Toolbar and kill the Firefox extension and the IE plugin

and another request: sticky notes, notes that should stand out (maybe linked with events from Google Calendar)

I hope I don't ask for too much.

Google Notebook Review

Google Notebook is live. It's a small tool useful if you want to make research on the web - you may want to compare different brands of cars, or gather information for a school project.

It comes as a Firefox extension or as a Internet Explorer plugin. After you install the extension, go to a page, select a fragment from the page that can include images, right-click and choose "Note this". You'll see a very small windows in the bottom-right corner which will stay there even if you go to another page. You can open or close the notebook from the status bar.

If you maximize the notebook, a new tab will open, but the new page will have all your notes in full size. You can edit the notes with a rich-text editor, print the notebook and even create more than one notebook. If you have more than one notebook, you can move a note from one notebook to another using drag and drop, but the experience isn't great (in Firefox, it doesn't work most of the times). Divide a note into sections to organize your notes, especially if you want to print them.

While Google Notebook keeps the general layout of your selection, it doesn't respect the style of the page. For example, if an image has an inline style defined, Google Notebook copies that, but if the page defines its style in an external stylesheet or in the head section, Google Notebook ignores the style.

The rich editor for notes is a small version of Google Page Creator engine, but it doesn't work well, so use it just to change the text or the links, not to adjust the layout. There's no undo or a way to edit the HTML code. If you make something stupid with the note, press Cancel and the note will revert to the previous form.

The selection from Flickr:


The selection rendered by Google Notebook:



You can adjust the spacing if you drag the small indicators you can see in the screenshot above.

By default, a notebook is private. If you want to share it, you can make it public. This way, it will become searchable at this page (for the moment, search is not available).

All in all, Google Notebook is a handy tool that works well for a small list of notes. You can search your notes, but you can't go to a note from the search results so it will be difficult to organize a large set of notes.

A similar solution to Google Notebook is Clipmarks, a service that has additional features: you can tag notes, comment on other people's notes. A note in Clipmarks looks like this.

Related:
Google uses the community to improve search results

Google Notebook Screenshots

Erica, a Google employee, made some screenshots for Google Notebook, a product that will be launched next week:





Google Notebook seems similar with Google Bookmarks and has a lot from Gmail's design.

Update: Google Notebook is live. You can read my review.