Google Notebook End-of-Development

This is old news: Google is ceasing the developent of Notebook. Personally, this was a sad moment. Even with its rough edges, Notebook is a very unique tool that fits my information needs well. And it still does. I haven't noticed any decrease in the service since this announcement in January. This post tries to explain why Google Notebook is such an excellent application. It also presents a fast spec of the features that I see essential in any notebook app.

The Big Picture

Google Notebook does exactly what it says. It replaces paper notebooks. To be fair, I still use one paper notepad to write down notes during client phone calls but other than that, I use Notebook. I have zero tolerance for Post-It notes and the like. No paper on my desk. Even the paper notepad is just like a temp file and will eventually end up in shredder.

In addition to replacing paper, Notebook substitutes electronic notepads of which there many variants:

• Email sent to your own email address
  
• Local text files and Word documents
  
• Online text files like Google docs
  

All of these are improvements over paper in three areas: management, search and sharing.

1. Management

This is the reason people started to use computers instead of typewriters in the first place. By separating the act of writing from the physical output, the management of written material gets more flexible. You can make identical copies of your documents easily. You can categorize documents without reshuffling drawers. You can sort documents fast by different criteria and transfer large piles of them in small-size storage media or through communication networks. These same networks also enable you to to access documents remotely.

2. Search

Electronic documents can be queried with the help of computing power. Compared to a computer, humans are very slow at doing keyword searches over large bodies of text.

As the number of documents in a collection increases, search becomes more valuable. If you intend to save all your notes in one system like Notebook, search is likely to be the most important feature. It is somewhat surprising to see that Google Notebook has perhaps the worst search engine ever released by Google. The first thing that reveals a crappy search engine is that retrieval is very sensitive to inflectional forms.

A simple example. Three notes:

• "cat"
  
• "cats"
  
• "cat cats"

In Notebook, queries for "cat" and "cats" will return different results, except if the result contains both forms. in most cases, even grep would perform better. However, you can use labels in Notebook to somewhat improve search recall.

1. Search for "cats" does not find "cat"

2. Search for "cat" does not find "cats"

3. Search for "cat" will find all notes labeled with "cat".

3. Sharing

Third improvement in electronic documents over paper is the ability to share them more efficiently. There are four modes of sharing:

• one reader/one writer: distributed copies of the same files
  
• multiple readers/one writer: write-locked files in a network share
  
• multiple readers/multiple writers: database applications
  
• (one reader/multiple writers is so rare I can't find a single example)

Distributing copies is the traditional method of sharing electronic documents. This is what you do with email or file transfer. The problem is in distributing and merging changes. In any actively developed document you will need a version control system to handle distribution and merging. Most programmers are well aware of this, since program code files are such documents.

When network storage started to get common, people began sharing documents, usually MS Office files, in a network share. The first one who opened the file got the write lock and the rest of the collaborators were just readers. In Excel there was even an option to switch the write access between users, and even secure the write access with an edit password. This scheme works for small groups, but it contributed to the way of managing corporate data that is commonly known as "Excel hell", a sea of somewhat connected Excel documents. A large part of information systems history of the 21st century can be summarized as reconstructing these shared excel files as database-backed web applications.

Finally, database systems are designed for concurrent writing, so that online services like Google Docs, Notebook and Wikipedia allow multiple writers to modify a document at the same time. Of course, this makes version conflicts possible and require some sort of a version control scheme.

I have never used Google Notebook sharing features, since I don't work with other people familiar with the application. There is a notebook-level sharing with edit priviledges to everyone invited, and also an option to publish the notebook as a static web page. Notebook-level sharing is probably a good choice, since you can keep private notebooks easily separated from a shared one and yet move notes easily between each one.

Notebook != Word Processor

There are a few features that make a notebook app unique. First, note taking is not document preparation or word processing. Printing is not a primary concern here*. Notes are all about planning and observing, they are like a personal ERP system.

* before laptops and online apps I used to print summary todo-lists out of my notes

Task management

The closest thing to compare Notebook is a task management application like RememberTheMilk. The key feature in both is the speed an ease of creating new tasks/notes. While task management focuses on due dates and reminders, a notebook focuses on planning with or without time constraints. It is still a useful feature in a notebook app to include due dates and especially have a simple tool to attach formatted 'Now' timestamps. Timestamps are extremely useful in notes but in Google Notebook you either have to write them yourself or use an external tool to generate one to clipboard.

Project management

Google Notebook supports grouping of notes well. This means that every user can customize the browsing experience. There are two levels of grouping: notebooks and sections, which is enough for most users.

For me, a single note corresponds nicely with a small project, especially if the project has some logical end. This kind of a projects consist of tasks that are simple one-line items. A notebook consists of similar projects. I always had a section "Old" in every Notebook. When a project is finished, I moved it to the old category. Sometimes I use an "Active" section on top of the notebook, with all the active projects.

Things to remember

I have found notebook very handy in storing snippets of knowledge that I may need another time but don't want to search the hard way. Software development and system administration is full of such small contextual things. These should be easy to transfer to Google Docs if Notebook is eventually shut down.

Final Words

Notebook is essentially an unstructured or loosely structured information system, with full-text search and the ability to organize notes to relevant categories. Tagging helps to connect notes in different categories.

In the current Internet ecosystem, it is probably hard to make money out of a Notebook-style application. Even Google couldn't sustain it with all the advertising infrastructure they had in place. Notebooks are private and sketchy and I think they should be paid for like their paper counterparts. One dollar/euro a month would be a reasonable price, and the payment should be smooth.

-mika-