Google Keep
drive.google.com
drive.google.com
Given that you need a Google Account to use this, and it is a new component of Google Drive, I don't think its really about winning back people who have rage-quit Google over the discontinuation of Google Notebook (or Google Reader, for that matter.)
Google is doing something which I didn't think was possible, which is to teach a vast marketplace that "free" isn't real.
I've had the conversation with lots of people about how free services are unsustainable because they incur real costs, and like a ponzi scheme you run out of suckers eventually who are willing to put in new money. And yet if you're collecting new users then there is some "value" there. But like shale oil of old, if you can't convert the 'value' into cash to fund operations, its not worth anything.
Google is in a unique position to train the billions of Internet users that you want something, you pay for it, if you aren't paying for it, it goes away at any time. So when the person running the 'free' service says 'time to pay up' you don't complain, you either pay or do without.
That was an impossible conversation to have during Web 1.0, it's being forced on Web 2.0, and I expect will be the foundation of Web 3.0.
Even if you're paying for something, it can still go away. There have been lots of paid services that failed, both online and offline. (Kozmo.com, Saab, Webvan, Hostess, etc)
There are sustainable free services, and there are unsustainable paid services, and often companies don't know what category a product falls into until years after it's been released.
And there is no evidence of them selling. It is just FUD.
Oooookaaaaay.
What have they spent it on? I have a mental disconnect between companies like Evernote and 37 signals. Why did Evernote need all that money?
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.
Awful.
It would seem that they were released in 4.2: http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.2.html
Wondering whether is just a clever app by Google or something that makes it difficult for Evernote et al to compete.
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.
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.
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.)
And that can be a compelling reason to do it, anyway, sure.
What, I can't do the same with an RC car chassis and a handful of Arduinos?
So you use Keep it ends up being good[2], but then 1 year from now Google announces it'll be shut down. Oh no! I guess I just have to download all my data from Keep and upload it to Evernote.
I understand people (although seemingly more people than actually used the product) are upset about Reader, and justifiably so, but I think it's a little hyperbolic to evaluate every new Google product in that light.
[1] https://www.google.com/takeout/
[2]I haven't used and don't really plan to, so I have no idea whether or not it's good.
When they realize they want more from you they change things around to make that easy.
If/when they figure out it costs more money to run that pseudo-free service they unplug it.
People then get upset. But that's not Google's fault. We need to consider ourselves lucky that it lasted as long as it did.
As long as this is true Google will remain loyal to them before it's loyal to the end users.
RSS is an open format and because of that you can choose whatever news reader you like.
I hope you'll enjoy whatever app you've found.
I don't think Apple will block that.
Apple already allows Dropbox SDK apps.
It probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense to assume that services introduced after Google announced that they were going to start trimming old offerings that didn't warrant support and increase the focus on what they do introduce are likely to be closed just because Google is closing services introduced before that effort was announced.
The whole point of that effort is to kill the existing zombie offerings and stop creating new ones.
It's a minimal todo list for godsakes.
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.
If people don't want to deal with that hassle then stay using what you have. I use Evernote right now, have it synced across multiple computers and two mobile devices. I may switch to Keep, I may not - but the whole Google Notebook being shut down isn't going to deter me from using a future Google Service.
If Google Keep ends up being a lackluster service then I should expect it to go away. Hopefully it won't, however from my experiences with Notebook, I'm extremely confident that even if it does, I won't lose any data.
Google has a well established record now for abandoning projects. Especially those that are free.
With the attitude expressed in the comments here, one should never ever use any startup's new product, because 99% of them will fail, and they probably won't have anything like Google Takeout to help you migrate before they are shutdown.
For various reasons (that have nothing to do with their viability as a company) I don't use Evernote and didn't use reader and I'm not going to use keep. But I think it's fair to consider google's track record with similar products over the last decade when debating whether or not to use keep.
How is a standalone, non-monetized product like Reader similar to a feature of Google Drive (one of the core elements of the paid Google Apps.)
I don's see how monetized vs. non-monetized is a relevant issue, unless I am completely off in how much of google's revenue comes from advertising. Google search is just as free as reader was and was just as non-monetized at first. I don't think that a significant percent of google's revenues come from Drive, but if you have contradictory data I'll concede the point that Drive is likely to be around in some form. That still doesn't prevent them from introducing and removing features of google drive; features like Keep.
Edit (forgot one thing): the other point illustrated by reader is that google is more focused than it was 8 years ago. I can't imagine a product like reader lasting 8 years if it were introduced today.
I can't see a product like Reader (in terms of its weak connection to any coherent long-term Google strategy, not its primary features) being released by Google today. Which is, incidentally, just another way of saying that cancellation of products that originated before Google's "more wood behind fewer arrows" focus isn't really a good yardstick for Google's commitment to products released under that new regime, for reasons which should be pretty obvious.
Google has a well-established record for closing services that were introduced before they announced that they would be closing services that were languishing and working to stop introducing services that would languish that way.
I'm not sure how that warrants suspicion about closing directed at services introduced after that focus was announced.
Evernote-like data is certainly a good addition. Google Glass is even scarier -- the ultimate tool for behavior analysis.
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.
"You start using it, I'll start my countdown to the service's death."
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).
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.
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.
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.
Given the fact that they are saying access from the Drive UI is coming soon, I suspect the release was rushed after the accidental leak. I wouldn't expect them to release a new Drive app when that requires a separate URL before its integrated into the Drive UI.
OTOH, its not unheard of for Google to introduce a new service in a fairly minimal form and rapidly add features once it is deployed. So, that could be the plan (and, of course, both could be true -- this could be an ahead-of-schedule, and less-complete-than-planned deployment of something that was planned to be released in what would have been a fairly minimal form anyway.)
Do you have a link for that? I was wondering why it wasn't integrated better with the rest of Drive, and that would make sense.
Last sentence: "You can access, edit and create new notes on the web at http://drive.google.com/keep and in the coming weeks you'll be able to do the same directly from Google Drive."
Off-topic, but does anyone remember the time when Google's UI consisted of just a textbox with their logo on a plain web page? And how they were getting tonnes of praise for that?
Are they? The press thus far has sort of focused pretty heavily on Thrun. If he were to walk away from Google, I wonder what would actually happen.
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.
EDIT: now it's back to the popup... There wasn't anything particularly exciting anyway.
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?
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.
this reminds me, I need to get all my crap out of docs/drive whatever before that gets shut down
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.