Google Notebook gets the boot

This message goes out to all of my peers who enjoy using Google’s Notebook as much as I do.

Amidst the Global Financial Crisis many businesses have closed their doors and even more employees have lost their jobs – even corporate giants are feeling the pinch. Google announced two days ago that they will be discontinuing some of its less popular services, amongst which is Google Notebook.

Me, being an avid user of Google Notebook to keep my web-clippings in order, was quite shocked at this possible disruption in my information management efforts. And quickly headed over to the Official Google Notebook Blog to find out exactly what is happening. Turns out that Google is stopping development on Notebook from next week – which means that there will be no further feature additions to be expected in the future. The good news is that people that have already subscribed to the service will be able to continue their use of Notebook – but those who have not yet subscribed will have to choose from a list of alternatives:

• SearchWiki – We recently launched a feature on Search that will let you re-rank, comment, and personalize your search results. This is useful when you’ve found some results on Google Search that were really perfect for your query. You can read about how to use SearchWiki in this blog post.

• Google Docs – If you’re trying to jot down some quick notes, or create a document that you can share with others, check out Google Docs.

• Tasks in Gmail – For a lightweight way to generate a to-do list or keep track of things, we recently launched Tasks in Gmail Labs.

• Google Bookmarks – For a tool that can help you remember web pages that you liked and access them easily, take a look at Google Bookmarks. You can even add labels to your bookmarks to better organize and revisit them.