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Google Keep has been launched: it's Google's latest attempt to create a service for taking notes. Unlike Google Notebook, Keep is a Google Drive app (the Drive integration is not yet ready for public release), it doesn't have a rich-text editor and it's optimized for mobile.

There's an Android app and a desktop site. Both use the sticky notes metaphor and you can choose the color for each note, add text, images, lists and voice recordings that are automatically converted to text in the mobile app. Both interfaces let you choose between the grid view and the list view.



Google Keep lacks many of the features that were available in Google Notebook: labels, sorting, comments, multiple notebooks, rich-text editor, sharing. It looks like a lightweight Google Notebook for mobile devices.

"With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what's important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand," informs Google.

It's likely that each Google Keep note will be a file in Google Drive, so you'll be able to share it with other people, add it to a folder, download it etc.

For now, Google Keep is the only Google Drive service that has more features in the Android app than in the desktop interface.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Carlos Jeurissen found some interesting hints about a new Google Drive app called Keep. There are multiple references to Google Keep in the GDrive code, including some URLs like: https://drive.google.com/keep/?note. In fact, the codename for Google Keep is "memento" and the MIME type for Google Keep files is "application/vnd.google-apps.note". Obviously, Google Keep is a replacement for Google Notebook, a service that has been discontinued back in 2009.


Carlos also found the service's icon and a short URL that redirects to the Play Store page for a non-existent Google Keep app.


Google has a cool Chrome extension called Scratchpad. It's great for taking notes and it syncs with Google Docs. Let's hope that Keep is better than both Scratchpad and Google Notebook.

Update: Android Police has some screenshots of the new service.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

Google Notebook is one of the many Google Labs services that will be shutdown. The team stopped developing the service three years ago and it's surprising that you can still use most of the features in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and other browsers.

A message now informs users that Google "will automatically export your Notebooks to Google Docs starting November 11, 2011". The FAQ explains that "once we start the transition, each notebook you have will automatically be exported to Google Docs. We will do this for every single notebook, and you won't have to do anything. This export will work the same as the existing 'Export to Docs' feature in Notebook. The format of the new documents will be as if you manually exported each of your notebooks to Docs."


Google hasn't released a new app for notes probably because the Google Docs word processing app is good enough to handle notes. There's even a cool Chrome extension developed by Google that lets you take notes and synchronizes them with Google Docs.

{ Thanks, Shahed and Taylor. }