Webware

Just a little more than a week ago Google announced it would no longer be developing Google Notebook, its free collaborative notes and bookmarks service. While this doesn't mean the service is closing its doors--and more importantly, not allowing people to create and work on new notebooks--most folks will want to move to something that's (hopefully) going to have bugs fixed and a person to talk to when things go wrong.

On Friday we put together a short list of possible alternatives, and now several of those have come up with import tools that will grab whatever you had put together in Google Notebook so you can continue to work on it.

The latest service to come up with an importer is Zoho Notebook. Late last night the company rolled out a new version of its Zoho Notebook plug-in that lets you slurp up all your Google Notebook entries with one button. To go along with this there's also a new option in Zoho Notebook called "text pages" that attempts to emulate the drag-and-drop text list ordering found in Google Notebook. For now the tool is Firefox-only, and cannot display anything besides text clippings when viewing your notebooks from the its small pop-up window.

Ubernote's co-founder Joshua Ho pinged me to let me know that he and his team had a 24-hour coding "marathon" to put together a Google Notebook importer. After working out some kinks with duplicate tags and some stray parsing errors the tool looks up to snuff.

The good news about Ubernote's iteration is that you don't need to install a browser plug-in like Zoho is requiring. The bad news is that you have to go into Google Notebook to export each notebook individually, then re-upload the files to Ubernote one at a time. If you have a ton of Google Notebooks this might be a royal pain in the you know what.

If you want to offload Google Notebooks to your local machine there's always the HTML option.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Coming really soon:

Diigo, which I did not originally include in the Google Notebook alternatives post, but offers many things that Google Notebookers might find attractive, is also working on an importer. It's not out yet, but should be soon.

Likewise, Evernote is hard at work on an import tool of its own. I'm told it will be ready on Thursday. In the meantime, if you have a healthy knowledge of coding language Python, Livejournal user rainyrhy has put together this script which will take exported Google notebook pages and convert them into .enex files which Evernote can then import. This probably isn't the best option for most folks, and will chop up any pictures you might have saved on the service.

With Thursday's news that Google is discontinuing development on its Notebook service, it may leave a few people looking for a viable replacement. The good news is that there are a handful of really solid products that do the same thing, and in some cases--do it better. Here's a list of seven of our favorites, in no particular order.

1. Evernote

Evernote has a few big things going for it, the main one being its cross-platform architecture which lets you access and add to your Evernotes from multiple devices. It also has optical character recognition, which means any photos you send in will be scanned for text, which gets indexed for searching.

Serious desktop users will most likely want to download the local client, which enables you to create and edit notes even when you don't have an Internet connection. There's also a browser plug-in that lets you clip entire Web pages, or simply bits of them, to save for later.

If you want to get at Evernote on your phone there are clients for both the iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets. Both let you access your notes collection and create new ones right from your device. This includes things like voice messages and snapshots from your phone's built-in camera and microphone.

The service is free to use up to a certain amount of data per month, which you can easily go over if you intend to use it for archiving high-resolution photo scans or for storing large files. However, if you're just using it for quick notes, and a few photos and Web clippings you'll be well under the limit.

Shortly after the news that Google Notebook was ceasing development, Evernote announced it would soon be providing an escape hatch for users to export their stuff over to Evernote free of charge.

2. Zoho Notebook

Zoho's Notebook is probably one of the best services for ex-Google Notebookers to flock to if only for its collaborative features. Several people can work on the same notebook at once, and it combines a handful of Zoho's other Web productivity services into one place. For instance, you can drop in a presentation from Zoho Show, add a video from YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, or any other site that uses embed code, as well as upload files from your desktop to share or squirrel away on Zoho's servers.

Additionally there's live chat with other Zoho users and collaborators, voice recording, and the capability to link to other notebooks within any notebook.

Its learning curve may be a bit steep for Google Notebook users unfamiliar with other Zoho products, but one thing that might help is the optional browser extension (for IE and Firefox) that lets users clip bits of Web pages to send to specific notebooks.