Google Keep
keep.google.com
keep.google.com
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.
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.
Google produces Android, which is a platform. The platform business model is well understood: gain a toehold by making a product that provides some fundamental service (telephony, mobile internet, app store), then expand the value of your platform by covering the long tail of things people might find useful (Keep, the new camera app, the various rollouts mobile versions of well-known Google products).
This if why Google Keep exists. Let's say Keep has 10 engineers working on it. Imagine the impact those ten people can have: Android has an addressable market of well over a billion handsets. If you apply standard shitty-startup-business-plan logic, capturing even one percent of them is a significant user base. And they don't even need to worry about revenue because the advertising business is literally printing money! It almost makes you envy them for working at such a large company.
Google Keep is a simple little synchronized notepad thing... It isn't an all-singing, all-dancing, mega-app―but it is quite useful for keeping notes which you can then access from everywhere, and it's quick and easy to use.
I've found it very handy!
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.
So I ask, what big problem does this solve?
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
EDIT: I was wrong. There was a similar product named NoteBook before that and they shut it down. http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html
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!
Google Keep is an app I have been using for over a year now... I think will submit a random Google service's website and make HN's front page also today.
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.
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.