Google Keep, a New Service for Taking Notes
googlesystem.blogspot.in
googlesystem.blogspot.in
While it's nice to not have to migrate your content every decade or so (Google Reader was introduced 8 years ago), it's certainly not that painful. As apps and services evolve at blistering pace, I love the fact that we can get some fresh air, and a wave of new innovations. I hope more companies do what Google does, discontinue products, for whatever reason, and give others a chance to grow.
With Reader, (apart from historical read/unread/starred/etc) this is as simple as downloading an OPML file and uploading it somewhere else.
With Gmail, it's more tricky. Migrating emails is fairly trivial, migrating the address itself though (unless you own the domain) involves updating all your contacts and changing your settings for every site you use on the internet (auto mail forwarding of course makes this easier).
With Notes, I'm not sure there's a standardised format for exporting/importing from one service to another. Certainly, with different features between each product a lot of information would be lost when doing so.
If you're fine with that and/or don't keep really important notes in the service then it's not really an issue. If you want to ensure they stick around as long as possible, then you need to pick a service that is committed, or one that you control yourself.
Honestly, I don't understand the stance of using an inferior product (this assumes you believe Keep will be superior to EverNote, if not, then why even comment?) because you fear the superior one will be shut off. I rather use a product from a company that has a history of providing mechanisms to take out my data if/when they shut the product down instead of a startup/small company that will probably lose all my data when they go bankrupt or get acqui-hired.
Because 99.99999% of EverNote's revenue does not come from some other part of business?
One thing is for sure: most users that did use Reader will skip this one :)
Obviously both might end up dropping it for one reason or another, it just feels like Evernote are likely to fight harder to stay in this market and to keep me happy.
Of course we should still choose products based on their positive qualities and the freedom to use our data as we wish is an important one.
I just blogged about this: Google has cancelled 5 services that I used for work projects. I have just switched to using my own domain email as primary, moving my blog from Blogger to one of my own servers (Wordpress is actually pretty cool), and I am using Dropbox as my primary photo and music repository (now using Google's and Apple's services as just backups).
I really like being a paying customer for services that are important to me. I like Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's free offerings, but I use them without depending on them.
I wonder different Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's businesses would be if they had a modest fee (like $25/year) for users, and made users customers instead of products?
Or to put it their way, RSS limits their profitability.
And I mean that. Maybe they've got some useful insight that allows for the possibility that this will be different.
Google Notebook was "discontinued" only a few years ago - and the kinds of consumers who would be interested Keep almost certainly share a significant overlap with those who two years ago were interested/used Notebook, and therefore have literally been bitten by Google in this exact space in the last few years.
[1] http://vator.tv/news/2013-01-17-phil-libin-on-an-evernote-ip...
A new experimental product by Google with a dubious monetization strategy at best has the name "Keep".
If they did do that it would also makes it less likely they'll pull it at some point in the future. Bundle it with Android and you're going to hit hundreds of millions of users very quickly. Even Google don't pull back from that sort of thing without thinking.
Nobody even read the goddamn article. Bunch of parrots.