How GoogleNotebook Can Improve
I've pretty much abandoned Outlook for Personal Information Management in favor of Google's various apps. Calendar and Email are no brainers. But the GoogleNotebook deserves some further comment. When you consider the typical functionality of a notebook, it should be the easiest app to provide, and in fact there are many competing implementations from other providers. There's much more that should be done, though, and it seems to me that because the basic app is so simple it get's very little attention.
The existing product has some good functionality: multiple notebooks and sections to help organize your notes, nice AJAX UI to move and browse through notes and edit with basic WYSIWYG controls, sharing so you can collaborate or make your notes public. The trash can, too, is a nice addition. And they've made progress since the early releases. At first, it was very URL centric. As if the only thing you could possibly want to make a note about is a web page identified by a URL.
As a side note, as I come up with blog ideas, i enter them into one of my notebooks, and in this case, I'm even writing this entry with GoogleNotebook.
Accessing the Notebook
I chose to abandon the Firefox extension, as, again, it is focused on making notes about web pages, which I don't often have a need for-- usually a simple book mark is enough. Instead I added the notebook widget to my iGoogle homepage. The module is a little buggy. I frequently can't insert the cursor on a note and type. I can use it to browse notes, but when i want to enter something, i need to click on the header which will take me to the Google Notebook site.
UX
It can be tricky to jump to the bottom (or top) of a note to enter something at the end. I usually just hold the down arrow and get to the bottom of a doc, but in Google Notebook, when you are at the end of a note and click down, it goes on to the next note. [I just realized that PageUp and PageDown work and will not take me beyond the note I am currently in.]
I haven't found a reason to use "Add Comment" at the end of a note. Why not just enter your comment inside the note? Anyone have a use for this feature?
If you think about how a physical notebook is used, some common use cases include images. E.g. a scrapbook or notes with sketches. I should be able to embed (inline preferably) images and other document types in my notes. This would include JPGs, Google Docs, Spreadsheets, PDFs, etc. And a drawing interface to include simple sketches would be a useful feature, as well.
What about tagging? Google is a big supoprter of the tagging model (a la Gmail), but it's no where to be seen in GoogleNotebook. Sure, I can organize my notes in multiple notebooks and sections, but that's a hierarchical organization and at this point we're all aware of the organizational benefits of the tagging alternative. I want both options.
Integration with other Google Functions
I'm also disappointed with the level of integration between the Notebook and other Google functions. For example, I don't make notes about random URLs, but I might want a note about a GoogleBookmark. Note that this is different from a Note with bookmark in it.
Gmail presents another good opportunity for integration. I often get emails with bits of information that I want to save. Frequently I just want to file away a small snippet from the email rather the whole email. Why can't I make a Note from an email message or a portion of an email message.
Conclusion
In the end though, I'm using the product and realizing benefit from it. I have some complaints and my wish list, of course. I'm just not blown away by it, in the way that I am by Gmail or Google Calendar. To be fair, though, I can see improvements rolling in over time.