
Google Keep - chriscampbell
https://drive.google.com/keep/
======
larrywright
I used Google Notebook fairly heavily, but they discontinued it. I love (and
pay for) Evernote now, which has lots of great integrations with other
products. Why would I trust Google again?

~~~
alec
Evernote has taken hundreds of millions in funding over the course of five
years. How they going to justify that investment with some portion of their 11
million users paying $45/year? Are they going to sell? If they sell, will the
service survive?

~~~
taligent
It is a pretty high proportion though (>1M) and the user base is incredibly
loyal. Combine with the lock in effect, lack of decent competition and
opportunities into enterprise market and you have recipes for a bright future.

And there is no evidence of them selling. It is just FUD.

~~~
Evbn
So Google Keep, a freenium product with Takeout, is evil, but Evernote, a paid
product with lock in, is good?

Oooookaaaaay.

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nlawalker
Putting aside snarky sentiments about its inevitable shutdown: pretty neat,
although as others have stated, it seems a little _too_ minimal. I imagine if
your life is already on Drive that this could be pretty useful. I especially
like the Android lock screen widget that lets you add stuff directly from the
phone (mentioned on their blog)

Regardless of the product you use, searchable cloud-synced notes that you can
quickly access are a life changer, even if they're just text files. It's like
direct memory augmentation; I can't imagine why anyone _wouldn't_ want to have
it. "The weakest ink is better than the strongest memory" and all that. The
trick is to make a workflow for yourself that allows for writing stuff down
_now_ and finding/organizing it later. I find OneNote + SkyDrive works pretty
well - it ties you to the proprietary OneNote format, but the features you get
from it are powerful, and as long as you have the client software and a place
to put the files (preferably on the web), no one can "shut the service down".
Perhaps I'll give this one a try though.

~~~
ocean12
It's only Android 4 and higher.

Awful.

~~~
kyrra
You can bet that they will release an iOS app in the coming weeks. As for
people on Android 2.x, buy a new phone or yell at your phone manufacturer for
not upgrading you to 4.x.

Android 4.x brought some pretty massive changes to APIs and behavior that it
is not worth Google's time to continue to support it. They would rather try
and push as many people as they can to 4.x.

~~~
smcnally
The posted url opened and worked fine for me on this ipad.

------
mindstab
Warren Ellis: Dear Google: why launch Google Keep when you've just proven
you'll shut off productivity services when you get bored with maintaining
them?

<https://twitter.com/warrenellis/status/314493398138630145>

~~~
gpjt
Precisely.

I'd thought of building something like this for my own use last autumn, and
ironically actually started building it over the weekend[1] (GF away for the
week).

When I was young and naive, reading that one of the big boys was getting into
the space where I'd just started a project would have scared me off and I'd
have abandoned it. In recent, more clued-up years I'd have thought "ah, market
validation!" and ramped up my development effort. Now, in the light of the
Reader abandonment, it's more like a feeling of joy that Google will educate
the world about how great an idea this is, and then abandon it just about when
I have something that other people might actually want to use.

[1] <http://blog.memostream.com/2013/03/19/hello-world/>

~~~
dragonwriter
> Now, in the light of the Reader abandonment, it's more like a feeling of joy
> that Google will educate the world about how great an idea this is, and then
> abandon it just about when I have something that other people might actually
> want to use.

Drive, while also available for free, part of the core of the paid Google Apps
offering, and its (as the parallel to OneNote) a key part of Google Apps being
an alternative to Microsoft Office (and, consequently, to ChromeOS with Google
Apps being an alternative to Windows with Microsoft Office).

Its hardly positioned similarly to Reader which, however popular it may have
been with a segment that is overrepresented among active participants of
online forums focussed on technology, was pretty distant from any core
strategic focus for Google.

So, I wouldn't bank on Google canceling this any time soon (or even in 8
years, as happened with Reader.)

~~~
gpjt
You may be right -- possibly I'm overcompensating for my earlier worries.
Still, if the worst comes to the worst it'll still be an interesting project.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Still, if the worst comes to the worst it'll still be an interesting
> project.

And that can be a compelling reason to do it, anyway, sure.

~~~
gpjt
Indeed. Though now that I've realised it's unlikely to make me my millions, I
think I'll write it using Angular, Node, CoffeeScript, MongoDB, and possibly
Haskell.

------
bicknergseng
So many "they killed reader how can I ever trust Google again" comments. As if
everything ever has been permanent and Evernote will outlast humanity.

It's a minimal todo list for godsakes.

~~~
recoiledsnake
Google Notebook also was just a minimal notepad and yet it was killed.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Notebook>

Evernote is completely dependent on it's product to survive, so they won't
kill it unless they're going out of business. Same with One Note and Office,
Microsoft makes billions out of Office every quarter.

Google Drive is pretty much subsidized from Adsense profits just like Google
Notebook was.

~~~
jamesaguilar
They actually have a fairly large number of enterprise users. In any case, I
think the parent's point was that even if Google did eventually shut it down,
_it's a todo list_ so it shouldn't be that hard to replace.

~~~
recoiledsnake
The product itself can easily be replaced, but the pain of researching the
best alternative, installing new browser extensions, new mobile apps, and
changing your workflow is a pain in itself.

~~~
jamesaguilar
If you're super averse to switching costs, I don't imagine you'd ever switch
to Google Keep from whatever you're using now in the first place. So surely
that's not a major concern for the set of people that are actually considering
switching?

------
Intermediate
No, thanks. I'll keep out of any new google services

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
I'm also looking to support some file syncing services in my new iOS/Mac app
and as technically interesting as Google Drive SDK looks I think I can trust
Dropbox a lot more.

------
medell
Where does this fit in with the forgotten Google Tasks, if at all? (Tasks is
hidden under the "Gmail" drop-down).
[http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2011/01/top-tasks-for-google-
ta...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2011/01/top-tasks-for-google-tasks.html)

------
cdi
Google is scary. Soon Google will achieve semi monopoly in its ability to
develop certain kinds of advanced machine learning / AI and analyze human
behavior, due to exclusive access to vast amounts of data. I would prefer
crucial advances in these disciplines to be described in detail in publicly
available papers, with open implementation, by academic researchers, rather
than outlined in announcement and mostly closed/proprietary, for the benefit
of shareholders.

Evernote-like data is certainly a good addition. Google Glass is even scarier
-- the ultimate tool for behavior analysis.

------
jrajav
I facepalmed when I saw that Google omitted a feature that they also left out
of Tasks, even though this application clearly has a lot more energy and drive
behind it - labeling / tagging.

It's such a simple, unobtrusive, and elegant feature that there really isn't
an excuse to exclude it, given the enormous benefits it adds to any kind of
note-taking or organization application. It instantly allows the user to
implement any kind of organization system, from haphazard brain-dumping all
the way up to GTD.

And it doesn't take a lot. You don't even have to clutter up your pristine,
trendy flat UI with labels displayed over everything - just allow the user to
1) Add any number of labels to a note (They don't even have to be displayed
anywhere, except maybe an out-of-the-way Labels dialog) 2) Filter the list of
notes based on one label. That's all! That's not so bad, is it?

This is also the one, single feature that could have allowed this to
immediately and effectively compete with Evernote.

~~~
Flenser
All they really need is a way to bookmark searches. Then labels can be
whatever system the user wants, #hashtags, @gtd_contexts, :whatever:

------
j2kun
Just after killing Google Reader, and you think you can get me back so easily?

~~~
ocean12
Paul Thurrott:

"You start using it, I'll start my countdown to the service's death."

<https://twitter.com/thurrott/status/314476511497445376>

~~~
humbledrone
Where does the countdown start? At nearly 8 years, which is the lifespan of
Google Reader? How many other free services on the web lasted that long [1]?

I'm an avid Reader user. I'm terribly sad to see it go, but I appreciate the
value I've gotten out of it while it existed.

Plenty of web services -- maybe most -- die after a while. Maybe the company
offering it goes under, maybe nobody uses it, or maybe it's just not
accomplishing the goals the company set out for it (ahem, Reader). In any
case, 8 years _has_ to be higher than the average lifespan [1]. So I assert
that even if you assume every new Google service will be killed in 8 years,
you're still better off choosing them (from a longevity perspective).

[1] I would absolutely _love_ to see some data about average web service
lifespans. I suspect that it is actually quite low. I also suspect that Google
has a much better track record than the industry (again, on average).

------
Metapony
I'm very surprised that they rolled this out without the "sharing" features
baked into Google Drive already. You can publish the contents of a
spreadsheet, but you can't get at these notes. I know the announcement says a
feature like this is coming in a few weeks, but why didn't they just withhold
the launch until it's more mature? I mean, who is going to early adopt
something so crippled? There seems to be such a lack of focus from Google
lately, and I'm not trying to hop on the bandwagon. But they could have rolled
this out with the share features already found in Google Drive.

------
habosa
This is extremely minimal, I'd honestly expect more from a Google product.
There's not even a tutorial or anything. Also why are there not any text
formatting options? I'd love a real Google Evernote competitor but this is not
even in the same league. Am I missing something, or is this just neutered
Google Drive?

~~~
ok_craig
Lots of people, including myself, feel that Evernote is overly complex and not
enjoyable to use. I've always wanted a simple app that lets me sync basic text
notes across devices. All the ones I've been able to find have something off
about them, whether it be interface, lack of sync, complexity, or other
annoyance. I find Keep to actually be quite nice, and it fits my needs. I
assume there are others for whom this is also true.

Edit: I guess you could say Google's Evernote competitor is just Google Drive
itself. If you want text formatting, create an actual Doc. Keep seems to be
explicitly for short-form, simple note taking. I think there's a large market
for that.

~~~
taligent
The plural of anecdote is not data.

The facts are that Evernote has in excess of 30M users, with lots of paying
users and growing rapidly. There is no evidence that this mythical complexity
is affecting adoption.

And I don't see how Google Drive and Evernote are competition. Very different
use cases.

~~~
magicalist
Who are you even talking to? The post you replied to just made an argument for
why this would be a viable product for some people, which is exactly what the
topmost post asked for opinions on.

The only possible phrase that could be construed as needing "data" to back it
up is "lots of people" being unsatisfied with evernote's complexity (which is
not a statement about that affecting evernote's adoption, incidentally), _and_
it's a statement that could arguably be satisfied with an anecdote in any
case.

You pulled the trigger on the negativity gun a little early here, even for
you.

------
ed2417
I think Google has chased away the early adopter, free evangelists.

~~~
smokinjoe
I would hope that early adopters know the risks of early adoption.

------
forgetcolor
until they change their minds and it becomes google lose

------
k-mcgrady
It's nice but I expected more from Google. If a new startup launched this
product it wouldn't get any press. Why should I use this when there are
already similar options (Simple Note) and ones which have many more features
(Evernote)?

------
dz0ny
Android app:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep)
everything works, but recording(crashes app).

~~~
bane
this makes a lot more sense to me than the web app. I'm usually in need of a
quick dictation tool that I can sync with my home pc everyday.

------
chriscampbell
Google has just released an Evernote competitor called Google Keep.

~~~
evan_
They killed Google Notebook a couple years ago. I don't know why I should
trust this one. Pretty ballsy to call it "keep", bloggers can start drafting
their "Google Loses Keep" headlines now.

~~~
lopatin
Data from Google Notebook wasn't lost, just transfered over to Google Docs.

~~~
evan_
Well, that's true, and to Google's immense credit they're very good about
letting go of data- I was referring more to losing the product itself.

~~~
smokinjoe
The product wasn't great. I used it quite extensively (I didn't know of any
other services) and it was filled with problems with layouts and pasting with
styles.

While I wasn't thrilled to see it go, it shouldn't have been that huge of a
shock to anyone. If anything, the best features from Google Notebook have made
their way into Google Drive.

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fatjokes
I would love this if I could make it my Chrome start screen.

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jsnk
I keep getting error popup. Anyone else getting this in FF?

~~~
masonhensley
Screenshots for y'all, it has a list view and a thumbnail view. You can add
pictures and tag with a couple basic colors.

<http://awesomescreenshot.com/08d12lg0d3>

<http://awesomescreenshot.com/00b12lfvea>

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threepipeproblm
Ha like I will ever enter into dependence on another Google app.

~~~
foxylad
I'd love to know how you posted that comment, then.

Because if you've stopped using anything from Google because they ditched
Reader, presumably you've also sworn off all Microsoft products (they killed
Clippy!), anything from Apple (R.I.P. QuickDraw 3D), Ubuntu (oh Gnome2, how I
loved thee)...

And you won't be using any internet provider since they ditched gopher, or
dial-up over the phone service because the bastards discontinued telex.

Or maybe you could admit that you're over-reacting slightly?

~~~
threepipeproblm
I suppose that would make follow if you interpreted my comment in the most
uncharitable way.

Microsoft used to be known for bending over backwards to maintain "backwards'
compatibility. Or used to be... I am in the process of moving away from MS.
They still don't kill products with millions of active users for political
reasons (<http://macsparky.com/blog/2013/3/the-rss-apocalypse>) as far as I
know.

But I was really referencing that I have no longer have any more desire to
depend on a free product (i.e. where I "am the product"), and put myself at
the mercy Google's increasing fickleness over what constitutes a viable
following.

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dvncan
why are the css classes so funky? (e.g. class="TUdKmf-xhiy4-haAclf h1U9Be-
xhiy4-qAWA2"). Are they randomly generated? what's the purpose?

~~~
xymostech
It looks to me like they're just obfuscated words. If you look at one of the
hierarchies, you see "TUdKmf-xhiy4-haAclf", then "TUdKmf-xhiy4-DKlKme-haAclf",
then "TUdKmf-xhiy4". Seems like they're just taking a normal class like "note-
body-wrapper" and "note-body" and obfuscating it.

~~~
darkstar999
What's the purpose of obfuscating css?

~~~
shrikant
Make it harder to use userscripts for custom styling..?

------
bane
What is this? Posterus again?

 _this reminds me, I need to get all my crap out of docs/drive whatever before
that gets shut down_

------
l0c0b0x
Guys!... this is obviously an early April fools Google site, mistakenly
released early.

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pasbesoin
Waiting on Google Discard.

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
It sounds like something Google would actually do.

Like a black hole service for making objectionable internet material just
vanish, never to be reachable again when logged into your Google account.

I'd add " <https://drive.google.com/keep/> " to it.

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devindotcom
Looks nice, but I'm gonna hang onto SimpleNote, thanks.

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Nightrider
I use OneNote already. It works beautifully because I can also add attachments
and images. Think Word + Evernote.

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unhe
everything from google is a living dead

