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One company’s wasted time is another’s opportunity.
One week after Google said it was stopping work on its Google Notebook content repository application, rival AdventNet’s Zoho Jan. 21 said it had added an option to let users import their Google Notebook content to Zoho Notebook.
As the name implies, Zoho Notebook is Zoho’s own SAAS (software as a service) application that lets users create text, image, audio and video content, store it on Zoho’s servers, and share it with colleagues and friends.
Zoho is making it simple for users to import content from Google Notebook. First, users install the new Zoho Notebook Plug-in, a Firefox plug-in users can grab here or download from the link at the top of the Zoho Notebook starter page.
Users then restart the browser, log in again to Zoho and Google Notebook, go to this URL and click start to begin importing Google Notebook pages to Zoho Notebook.
Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook are free, so this shouldn’t be viewed as a big strategic coup for Zoho over Google. After all, Google Notebook isn’t closed, merely in a state of arrested development. However, Zoho’s move is shrewdly cunning, warning Google that it will always be there to snap up disgruntled Google users.
Of course, Google would prefer users to stay at Google and save their content with other Google Web services.
Raj Krishnan, product manager for Google Notebook, invited users to check out Google Docs, SearchWiki, Google Bookmarks and Tasks in Gmail.
But there’s no guarantee that those services won’t be nixed as Google continues to tighten its belt during the recession, and those services won’t help users shuttle their Notebook content, a la Zoho Notebook’s new import feature.
There’s more to know about the Firefox plug-in, which has been bumped up beyond just being a connector to being a data depot on its own; any content added to the plug-in will be automatically synchronized with the online version of Zoho Notebook.
Users can aggregate content from external sites by selecting the text, right-clicking and picking the “Add to Zoho Notebook” option.
However, Zoho warned that the plug-in displays only text content, so video, audio and other embedded content won’t be viewable from within Zoho Notebook. But users can take screenshots of Web pages with the plug-in and upload them directly to the Zoho Notebook page.
Zoho Notebook has other new features, which you can take a gander at in screenshots.
One is a new page type called Text Page that lets users easily add text notes to the Zoho Notebook, similar to what users can do with Google Notebook. Users can reorder the text objects in this page by dragging and dropping the text content. In fact, content added to Zoho Notebook using the new Firefox plug-in will be added with Text Page.
Zoho Notebook also now lets users link between different Notebooks within the text object, allowing users to link to any URL externally and to pages within other Notebooks.