Evernote – Yet another DB for organization

March 18, 2008

I was excited to get an invitation to the evernote service. Who wouldn’t be? I mean it’s new, it’s beta, and it’s semantic web, right? Well, it is to a certain extent.

Evernote invites you to import all of your information into your profile. It also invites you to start sending all of your notes, images, thoughts, web sites and blocks of text to your account to be indexed. The promise is that the information will then be searchable.

One of it’s strongest features is its image text recognition. In other words, you can send a photo with text in it to your evernote account, the text will be recognized, interpreted and indexed for future searches. It sounds brilliant and if you’re like me you immediately start thinking of ways to take advantage of it. For example, if you were to take a photograph of every business card you get, with your camera phone, and send the images to your evernote account, you would quickly and easily create a searchable database of business cards.

It sounds fantastic.

So, what are the problems?

It’s a new service I’d have to integrate I’m already using dozens of web applications for all of my organization needs and, frankly, I’ll soon need an organization app to keep track of all my organization apps. I need services that are seamlessly integrated. I don’t care about novelty or unique features if I have to go out of my way to use it.
Show me an application that integrates with the database tag I already use to organize my information in gmail.
The image text recognition needs some work Don’t get me wrong, it’s the best one I’ve seen, but the problem is insurmountable if I upload a business card, then do a search for the name on the card, and evernote turns up zero results.
I realize that if I were to use tags in conjunction with the image recognition, I wouldn’t have this problem, but that adds yet another step to my “simple” database creation process – and maybe it’s just enough to run me off.
It’s not quite Semantic Why isn’t it? Well, because the app doesn’t recognize the relationships between similar items without being explicitly told through tagging.

Final Word: All in all, I’m very impressed with the technology that makes this app possible, but, like most new closed systems it fails to work with what I’m already using, and therefore makes it nearly impossible for me to seriously consider using it.

You can register for a beta invitation at Evernote’s website, and I strongly urge you to give it a try. And, as always, please let me know how you feel about my review.

Posted by flowersjustin | Filed Under reviews