> Google Keep let's you quickly capture what's on your mind.
Google already knows who my friends are, what they email me, what I look for, and now it wants to know what's on my mind as well. The service can be convenient, but it creeps me a bit that Google wants to aggregate even more information on me.
I don't think Google Keep is anywhere near a competitor of Evernote. Keep is a different class of application. More of a to do list or quick note manager. Whereas evernote is a full blown digital notebook with an extensive feature list. Its like comparing Microsoft One Note to the iPhone notepad.
I don't even think it is much competition for Evernote. They sit on two sides of the same need's spectrum of complexity, the extreme simplicity of Keep and the extreme feature-completeness of Evernote and OneNote. The main competitor of Keep is just Dropbox + some txt file.
I agree. Though my Evernote usage has dipped since I started using Keep.
I just need these for a rare plain-text note/list and the Keep App launches effortlessly.
Googler #1: "We've managed to capture everyone's video watching habits, email, activities via Calendar, audio and video calls, browsing habits, what they're looking at via Glass, and where they are via Maps. But there's a major hole in our knowledge: we don't know what people are thinking".
Googler #2: "Let's get people to tell us. We'll call it Keep and give it the tag line: 'Google Keep lets you quickly capture what’s on your mind.'"
This isn't an EVIL discussion to me. My view is that everything I put out on the internet is public. Things I want to keep private is the same as keeping my home safe. I can make it difficult for people to break in BUT if they want to I know that they can with enough effort. My job is just to make it more difficult than worth it.
Everyone is spitting data into the world. Who is seeing it is the question? I never stop being amazed at how people view the Internet as a private place.
Sure you can use Tor and Tail but really the Internet is not a locked box. Also I know that I am viewed as suspect by my government if I run either one of those on my IP. Causing them to think it is worth it to break in and look at my data.
Google is services I get for letting them see what I do. I am okay with being the product and use my internet as such. If you don't want to they don't have a business model for that.
Most people cannot roll out their own note syncing server. They have to trust someone.
Despite all the negativity here, Google is a decent choice. They take security seriously (TFA, PFS), offer clients for major platforms, and have the infrastructure.
This. I've either got to trust Evernote, Keep, Box, or something, because I'm sure as hell not going to spend the time to build out a feature-complete implementation of a note-taking tool that won't be a royal pain in the ass to work around. If Google really derives that much value from knowing that I need a bottle of wine and some deli meatballs at the grocery store and I need to call my doctor to reschedule my appointment next week, by all means, please take that information and do something useful.
Here's the reality of the situation:
- If the service gives me recommendations, that's not something you could easily roll yourself. There's always some sort of dependency, like Solr or ElasticSearch that you'd have to set up. I don't have the time or motivation to stand that nonsense up on my own VPS.
- I would almost guarantee that Keep or Evernote are more reliable than anything I could stand up on my own crummy VPS.
- Anything I could build probably doesn't have its own syncing app that works properly offline.
- Whatever I need to jot down probably doesn't even need half the security that the services out there provide. Do I really care if the list of movies that I want to watch on Netflix gets leaked to the public? Meh.
- It's unlikely that any home-grown or OSS solution would have the rigorous polish of Keep or Evernote.
I've been thinking about finding an app like this for a while. This is an ok implementation, but I think it's too rigid. Something like this should be messier and give the user some more freedom to arrange stuff the way he wants. More like an actual desk and less like a list of notes. Does anyone know of an app like that?
Two problems with your solution: No backups in case of loss/theft and having to carry around extra items all the time. I'd rather use a phone to take notes.
sure it is not perfect, but whenever I used a digital note taking thing I felt I was using the app to procrastinate rather than doing the real work. It might just be me, but it does not happen with a classical note book + I can scribble in it as well.
There's a difference between "I don't want to share some or most of my notes" and "There's just no easy way to share any of my notes, even if I wanted to".
If you can't think of a reason why sharing a note might benefit you, you either lead a very solitary life (nothing wrong with that) or you have a very limited imagination (nothing wrong with that either).
And even if you were the one-in-a-thousand (or higher) that simply has no need for any single feature of any modern note-taking app, saying "Well chiseling my notes into a rock works for me" really contributes zero to the discussion about the software.
I work on backend software. There is no UI or web-interface or whatever. I do almost all my work on the cli, so I really don't have much use for that either.
I see. And if I mention how you can't copy and paste from the CLI to your notes, or back again, you'll probably make up some reason why that isn't something you'd ever want to do either.
Good talk. Thanks for contributing your important view point about this software ("I don't need it") to the discussion.
I tried a few years ago, but I have not solved the problem of quickly finding something that I might have written a few weeks/months ago. And you can't reorder/update quickly your items every week either. Any tips on that ? I would be willing to try again because the feeling of paper and pen is much nicer that a cold and soulless screen.
You get the audio and images (and even video!) for free, searching and sorting are much faster, and you'll never have to buy pen or paper again.
And as a bonus, you'll stop polluting all the time (all of those empty pens and pieces of scribbled-on, crumpled-up paper) - when you die, your notes will just vanish with you.
Sounds like I just saved you a ton of money and time, and my advice can help you save the planet a little too.
Last year?! It's been out for how long? :( I really like it so far and have been wanting something like it for quite a while (I've been using plain text files in dropbox). I feel so... behind or something.
It launched to the public on March 20th, 2013. There are official apps for Android and iOS. I can't speak for the iOS app as I haven't used it, but the Android app is very nice.
With it being pre-installed on KitKat I just used it without thinking about whether it was "out" there yet. Great service that I use every day. You can even set each note with a reminder time or location that'll notify you (on phone and Wear) to, well, remind you of it. Great for things you remember at work but need for home etc...
When the major software company after making the web a resourceful place decides that taking notes is the next problem to tackle means that absolutely every problem in the world has already been solved.
This is precisely the sort of feature I'd like to see on a federated, distributed, secure-from-the-ground-up system. Not cloud. But self-hosted-with-peers.
See FreedomBox and Sandstorm.io for the closest approximations of this to date.
That's the biggest reason I'm not enthusiastic to use new google products. In this case, it looks nice and all, but Trello is more likely to still be there in 2 years.
95 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadGoogle already knows who my friends are, what they email me, what I look for, and now it wants to know what's on my mind as well. The service can be convenient, but it creeps me a bit that Google wants to aggregate even more information on me.
It looks like Google's taking on Evernote with Keep.
Right?
No reason to depend on Google for this kind of stuff. They'll probably ditch it at some point anyway.
Googler #1: "We've managed to capture everyone's video watching habits, email, activities via Calendar, audio and video calls, browsing habits, what they're looking at via Glass, and where they are via Maps. But there's a major hole in our knowledge: we don't know what people are thinking".
Googler #2: "Let's get people to tell us. We'll call it Keep and give it the tag line: 'Google Keep lets you quickly capture what’s on your mind.'"
Google tells us they keep the data. Everyone especially your ISP and government is capable of MUCH more private information.
Everyone is spitting data into the world. Who is seeing it is the question? I never stop being amazed at how people view the Internet as a private place.
Sure you can use Tor and Tail but really the Internet is not a locked box. Also I know that I am viewed as suspect by my government if I run either one of those on my IP. Causing them to think it is worth it to break in and look at my data.
Google is services I get for letting them see what I do. I am okay with being the product and use my internet as such. If you don't want to they don't have a business model for that.
Despite all the negativity here, Google is a decent choice. They take security seriously (TFA, PFS), offer clients for major platforms, and have the infrastructure.
Here's the reality of the situation:
- If the service gives me recommendations, that's not something you could easily roll yourself. There's always some sort of dependency, like Solr or ElasticSearch that you'd have to set up. I don't have the time or motivation to stand that nonsense up on my own VPS.
- I would almost guarantee that Keep or Evernote are more reliable than anything I could stand up on my own crummy VPS.
- Anything I could build probably doesn't have its own syncing app that works properly offline.
- Whatever I need to jot down probably doesn't even need half the security that the services out there provide. Do I really care if the list of movies that I want to watch on Netflix gets leaked to the public? Meh.
- It's unlikely that any home-grown or OSS solution would have the rigorous polish of Keep or Evernote.
If you can't think of a reason why sharing a note might benefit you, you either lead a very solitary life (nothing wrong with that) or you have a very limited imagination (nothing wrong with that either).
And even if you were the one-in-a-thousand (or higher) that simply has no need for any single feature of any modern note-taking app, saying "Well chiseling my notes into a rock works for me" really contributes zero to the discussion about the software.
Good talk. Thanks for contributing your important view point about this software ("I don't need it") to the discussion.
You get the audio and images (and even video!) for free, searching and sorting are much faster, and you'll never have to buy pen or paper again.
And as a bonus, you'll stop polluting all the time (all of those empty pens and pieces of scribbled-on, crumpled-up paper) - when you die, your notes will just vanish with you.
Sounds like I just saved you a ton of money and time, and my advice can help you save the planet a little too.
Switch today!
https://github.com/grena/gruik
https://github.com/shubik22/BetterNote
The second one I think doesn't have private notes, so lacks something very important. Nice bases to build something more robust, though
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5410267
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5410071
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5395147
I've been a user for a year now, and nothing has changed about the service except minor tweaks.
This is precisely the sort of feature I'd like to see on a federated, distributed, secure-from-the-ground-up system. Not cloud. But self-hosted-with-peers.
See FreedomBox and Sandstorm.io for the closest approximations of this to date.
So I ask, what big problem does this solve?