
Google Keep – Save what’s on your mind - swohns
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-keepsave-whats-on-your-mind.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29
======
Adaptive
I would have jumped on this a year ago.

The elephant in the room with every one of the Google announcements is that
they've drained their coffers of trust/goodwill with the early adopter crowd,
which is precisely the group you need to kick these things off.

Until Larry Page makes a clear, official public comment about this, I'm left
wondering what is considered core product and what isn't. Is this? Is it an
experiment? I get that this integrates with Drive, which is core product (it
is, right?). Not the point. Using a new tool is me spending time and effort to
learn/use/integrate into a workflow.

Until I know that I'm not going to be backtracking on this territory in two
years when Google has another epiphany about strategy, I'm left feeling
genuinely skeptical.

~~~
Recoil42
I'm not part of the whole Google Reader hate bandwagon, but this one makes me
puzzled too. Isn't Google Keep a shade too similar to Google Notebook (
<http://www.google.ca/googlenotebook/faq.html> ), a product they shut down a
couple years ago?

Does this show a lack of foresight in maintaining products, a lack of
dedication to making them successful, or what? There's clearly a problem here.

Google has the same duplication problem all over the place -- constantly
recreating projects that they've previously shut down, or running several
redundant projects simultaneously. Google Chrome and the AOSP Browser,
Buzz/Orkut/G+, Sites and Blogger (and whatever they had before). Reader and
Currents, What is going on here? Rather than improving a project, they seem to
have this epidemic problem of creating a whole new one and letting the old one
get lost in the fray.

~~~
jfoutz
Writing code is fun. Maintaining code sucks. You expect A programmers to stoop
to maintaining old crap?

------
donretag
"Changing priorities isn’t a problem"

I love the irony.

------
martythemaniak
The ceaseless whining over Google Reader is getting tiresome - I don't think
there's been a Google-related post in the last week that had discussion
actually related to the article.

Google took a zombie out back and double-tapped it. You can download your
data. You have plenty of alternatives eager for your business. Move on.

<http://xkcd.com/1172/>

~~~
Zikes
A lot of Google's business is based on our trust. We have to trust them as a
company, and we have to trust their ecosystem if we're going to invest our
time and data into it. If they consistently violate that trust, shouldn't we
get at least a _little_ upset?

~~~
abraham
We also have to trust them to shed dead weight or they will turn into a
bloated whale that is never able to produce anything of quality. They gave
plenty of warning time and have made it very easy to easily export our data.

------
b0sk
Before you put your data in this, make sure there's a way out because Google
has the nasty habit of discontinuing its stuff.

~~~
Zikes
I just checked Google Takeout, it's not listed there yet.

~~~
jrmiii
I think that's because it's dropping it right on your Google Drive. It's taken
out by nature, all the time, whenever you sync.

~~~
bookwormAT
I don't find my notes in drive. Except for the URL there seems to be me no
connection to drive.

~~~
jrmiii
You're right, neither do I.

But tfa clearly says, "Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced
to all your devices so you can always have them at hand." - So, I dunno.

EDIT: dammit, down at the bottom - last line - " in the coming weeks you'll be
able to do the same[view,edit,etc.] directly from Google Drive."

~~~
Zikes
Ah, I guess that settles that, then.

------
Newky
My initial reaction was that they were doing a read it later service and
competing with the likes of Pocket. That would be a disaster as that area
doesn't need competition at this time.

But it appears that they are targeting a light weight evernote replacement. A
killer feature for me on this would be a command line binary which calls up my
$EDITOR and allows me to write a note immediately and have them synced
immediately. This, with the power of lighter production of notes on mobile
devices could find a place into my workflow.

~~~
baq
this would be a killer feature for you and about 17 other people - if they
don't already use dropbox for that.

if that sounds offensive, just look at the number of reader users - and it got
axed. google doesn't aim at tens of thousands, it aims at millions.

~~~
zmmmmm
> google doesn't aim at tens of thousands, it aims at millions.

I think that is a bit simplistic in terms of why they shut Reader down. Reader
was in conflict with their G+ strategy, distracting millions of highly
influential people out of G+ and into a cannibalising product and technology
(RSS) with no clear G+ integration path. Google wants those people using G+.
Even if only 10% of them convert to G+ thats better than 100% of them using
Reader and living outside the G+ bubble. I suspect Reader was in the awkward
situation of being too small for Google to devote a major product /
engineering effort to migrate it's features into the G+ world but too big for
them ignore and just leave running as a side project.

------
Kylekramer
No integration with Google Tasks? It may be barebones and needing some love,
but I like having it to the side of my calendar.

~~~
donniezazen
Google Tasks might be a candidate for next Spring cleaning.

------
twistedanimator
I know it's been said a million times already, but no way would I use this
service after they shut down Reader.

Maybe they're just fishing to see how much marketshare they can take away from
Evernote? If it's enough they'll keep it and improve it. But if it doesn't
capture enough marketshare, I expect to see it culled in a few years as well.

------
minikites
Remember Google Notebook?

~~~
shared4you
I loved the Firefox extension for Notebook. Hope they make one for Keep as
well!

------
zmmmmm
I do need something like this; my Gmail is littered with drafts that I created
as notes to myself when I frantically needed to jot something down.

However it would be a thousand times better with time / date / calendar
integration. A large percentage of my random notes to myself are reminders to
do something by a particular time "pay electricity bill by thursday". Even
their example video shows this. Right now I use an app (Voice Calendar) which
puts an event in my calendar. However these aren't really events and it
pollutes my real calendar with all kinds of junk. I find it weird that despite
having awesome email and awesome calendar, Google has really not done a good
job of integrating their ecosystem into an exchange-like competitor yet.

------
slg
I keep seeing this listed as an Evernote competitor. I have a sneaking
suspicion that people saying that have never consistently used Evernote since
it does so much more than Keep apparently does.

------
dageshi
Yeah I don't think I'm going to fall for another product that looks like it'll
disappear in a few years time when google HQ gets bored of it.

------
jauco
"oops! an error occurred" On google chrome on windows 7

Not quite prime time ready? Or am I the only one?

~~~
Metapony
You aren't the only one.

------
hackernewbie
Boy, I can't wait to have two years worth of notes 'No longer supported'! Sign
me up!

------
alexpopescu
Is this sort of an announcement that Google failed to buy Evernote, so they
decided to create a project that does exactly the same things and that will be
discontinued after a while because it's not Google's focus?

------
Kiro
How does this compare to Evernote?

(I wish there was a way to filter out all the comments referring to Reader.
Most people including me don't care that they discontinued it so please stop
spamming about it everywhere.)

~~~
omonra
So 80% of the comments here mention the Reader and yet you surmise that most
people don't care about it?

Regardless of what your personal relationship to the Reader issue is, you
might consider the possibility that THIS product is axed after a few years
when you are used to it.

~~~
Kiro
80% on HN, 20% on other tech sites, <1% overall.

I don't think it's very likely. And even if it is I would just export my data
and go to another service. "But I'm used to it" is no argument since we're so
adaptable.

------
Metapony
drive.google.com/keep/ keeps giving me errors. I don't see how this is going
to be an Evernote-killer for me though. (I am actually new to Evernote, but
it's been wonderful so far.) I actually don't like google's unified product
integration! If there was a clear way to export or use webhooks to retrieve
these notes, I'd reconsider.

~~~
psweber
"Oops! An error occurred. Please click here to reload the page."

I'm getting it, too.

~~~
joshrotenberg
Me three, over and over.

------
tbourdon
I've got no time to invest in this. I'm too busy finding an alternative for
Reader and seriously looking at alternatives for Gmail because I'm just plain
torqued at Google right now.

------
ch8230
Keep your stuff at Google - until their next spring cleaning!

------
0xndc
So it's Evernote, but with two panes and a white widget?

------
jimdesu
... until you start relying on it. Then Google will shut it down. No way I'm
using any more Google products except the one I pay for (mail).

------
endgame
... until they kill it because nobody used it.

------
uslic001
I am getting the same reload error on Google Chrome on Win 8 notebook. Not a
very good way to launch a new product.

------
lsiebert
Mobile app lacks barcode scanning. I'll play around But Springpad still better
from what I can see.

------
nelse
Searching in Market/Play sucks. Try to find Google Keep now. Impossible.

~~~
bockris
It was way down the list for some reason. Look for the yellow icon.

~~~
crazy1van
If they put it at the top of the list, people would just complain about
showing favoritism for their own apps. Can't win.

------
baq
you can't even make a nested list or a proper table right now. i'll wait a
couple of weeks during which i'll probably forget about the thing.

------
EugeneOZ
When this service will be retired?

------
uribs
Any bets on when this is going to be discontinued?

~~~
jrmiii
Yep, right after you get hooked on it.

------
cooldeal
Is this hosted on Google Drive?

Anyone know if they did a post-mortem post explaining the Google Drive outage
from a couple of days ago?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394475>

The post quickly disappeared off the HN front page despite having a lot of
upvotes, perhaps due to flagging.

<http://hnrankings.info/5394475/>

