My first 100 days with EverNote (day 1)

I signed up for EverNote online yesterday and installed the beta for Windows today.

 

At least when sitting behind a PC, this beats writing notes in Notepad, which has been my practice until now. One thing I like is that all my notes are available in one chronological view within the same application. It is much easier to switch between notes than this way than between Notepad files in a Windows file directory.

 

The synchronization between the PC client and the online tool seems to work nicely. While staying logged in through Firefox, I've been switching between the browser and the PC client without problems so far.

 

In terms of features, as mentioned in the Web Tick (Wired?) article, an RSS feed could be really neat. That way, my public online persona, by way of my blog entries, could be captured by EverNote automatically.

 

Reversely, I'd very much like to blog straight from EverNote. Let's say that EverNote would publish /synchronize all notes tagged "www.josschuurmans.com" as blog entries through the TypePad API. Have to find out if something like this is possible.

 

Perhaps equally urgently, I'd really like a Symbian client, which would then compete rather heads-on with Nokia Lifeblog.

 

I wonder about compatibility. Can today's exports be read by next releases of EverNote? By other applications? Will there be an open source, more future-proof alternative?

 

I wonder about privacy. Is the CIA going to read my notes? Or rather Supo, who according to Sitemeter dropped in on my blog after I posted about the Jokela drama. Or my neighbor? Can it be hacked? Leaked?

 

I wonder about data security. Can EverNote guarantee sufficient physical backup? Should I do as Crhistian, and keep physical backups in several countries. (the answer is yes, of course)

 

I also wonder if the competition will be more reliable. Nokia is part of this value chain through the device input, Lifeblog and Ovi. Google can be. My email provider is.

 

Further, Flock comes to mind. Haven't heard much about the "social browser" lately. Sounded so nice, in particular - and most relevant to EverNote - the capturing functionalities.

 

Okay, so far so good: this works quite nicely as a blog post drafter/editor. So I think I won't spend too much time on Qumana.

Comments

[Alex Pachikov]

Jos,

Thanks for the post and the kind words. I thought I'll drop you a few lines to answer some of your questions and help you get going on your 100-day project.

Compatibility: If you are a user of Evernote 2.2 you can import your notes into the new service (v.3) and just about everything is supported. The exceptions are templates - which we don't support just yet. But we are discussing some ways to provide support for them. Regarding versions of Evernote 3 and on - we will always support notes from previous versions.

Privacy: We are very serious about privacy and security when it comes to user's notes. I will not go into detail here as they can be found in our privacy policy, but it should be sufficient to say that we will never make user's private information available to others without a user's consent. We even don't allow internal access to notes, unless it is related to tech support. For more info, check out the comment by our CEO (Phil Libin) at the bottom of this page: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/03/evernote-offers.html

Reliability: We did go to great lengths of provide a fast and reliable service out of a very nice datacenter. During the beta we are still going to do some maintenance, so you might see the "sleeping elephant" maintenance message, but going forward - we will minimize any server downtime to the best of our ability.

Nice that you mention Flock - we like Flock here as well.

Good luck with the project. Hopefully these will be the first 100 days of a lifetime of Evernote.

-Alex Pachikov
Evernote Corp.