The Google Notebook appliance has arrived with not much fanfare – the news competes with Apple’s announcement of the new MacBook, Sony’s announcement of a new pocket Vaio UX, Yahoo’s announcement of a new home page and probably others still to come. The Google announcement is byfar the most interesing one.
Google Notebook is a Firefox (and IE) extention that creates a notepad at the bottom right of the browser. You can “cut and paste” information from the current webpage (text, images, links), insert tags, and store the information on your Google “page.” The notebook can be private or public. Installing the Firefox extentions and then restarting the browser takes you to a startup tutorial page. After that, we’re on.
Although it’s branded “Google Labs”, not “Google Beta”, it feels more like betaware – some of the features are less than idea when compared to popular social network sites – or maybe I should just read the manual :).
[1] Google Notebook, for IE and FireFox, http://www.google.com/notebook
[2] Press release, “Sony delivers world’s first full-function, pocket-sized PC”, San Diego, May 16, 2006. http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/notebooks/release/22130.html
[3] Apple Website, Introducing the all-new MacBook, http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html