Actually first impressions is not accurate, I opened an Evernote account when Google Notebook closed. I was impressed at the the time, but with all these services you have to put an effort in to consciously change the way you work and USE the service for at least 2 weeks. Which I didn’t do, so the account just lay dormant for a long time.
…Until I recently got my iPhone 4. I’d heard before that Evernote is the one “must have” iPhone app, and I couldn’t agree more. I use a lot of services on a daily basis to keep me organised like:
- Remember the Milk
- Delicious
- Read it Later
Yet, despite being a power-user of these I still felt the necessity to carry pen and paper with me throughout my work day. I’m not alone in this respect, in LifeHacker’s recent survey pen-and-paper came out tops for geek’s ToDo list method of choice.
However I honestly believe that this time I’m gonna ditch the pen and paper once and for all. Don’t get me wrong, its not just evernote, its really a hardware thing – having the iPhone is what is enabling this. But iPhone + Evernote – that’s a killer combination!
A lot of Evernote evangelists recommend putting EVERYTHING into evernote and closing your delicious, RTM etc. But I won’t be. I find that different apps definitely serve different purposes. For my pure business tasks nothing beats Remember The Milk. But Evernote is making RTM even better, because I used to put a lot of notes and personal stuff into RTM which muddied my real work. From now on that goes all into Evernote.
Delicious was a more likely candidate to be taken over by Evernote, but from what I’ve seen so far, Delicious’s tagging system is way more powerful and scalable than Evernote’s. It’s also more social and easier to share a tag cloud of your delicious bookmarks like I do on another blog of mine. I looked at Diigo for a while but honestly, I am still a big Fan of Yahoo’s 2 pioneering sites Flickr and Delicious, which probably had more to do with ushering in Web 2.0 than any other sites. And they are still stalwarts – they hardly ever, ever go down – and the amount of useful stuff available via their API’s is mindboggling.
But evernote rocks and some of my daily tools have already gone extinct, Evernote proving way better.
- Sceenshot extensions (Fireshot et al)
- Sticky notes
- Audio notes on cell phone
and, as I said….. pen & paper.