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Luminotes versus Google Notebook

Luminotes versus Google Notebook

The world of personal wikis and note-taking software is a crowded one, and sometimes it's tough to cut through the marketing gibberish and bullet-point feature lists to find the software that meets your specific needs.

So it's completely understandable when people ask me what Luminotes does better than product X, where X happens to be another wiki or in many cases some non-wiki software.

In the interests of helping people decide whether Luminotes is for them, I'm starting a series of periodic blog posts pitting Luminotes head-to-head with other wiki and note-taking software. I'll highlight how Luminotes differs and what it offers you over the dozens of other products out there. In other words, I'd like to explain in an admittedly biased manner what Luminotes does for you and why you should bother with it.

So the first product I'd like to compare Luminotes with is Google Notebook, as it's one of the highest-profile note-taking products out there. Okay, so how exactly does Luminotes compare?

First of all, it depends entirely on what you're looking for. Google Notebook is a fine piece of software, apparently designed for creating web clippings and writing notes about them. But it's pretty unusable as a personal wiki. What follows is a summary of some differences between Luminotes and Google Notebook, which will hopefully give you a better idea of the software that will meet your needs.

Luminotes supports links between your notes

One of the things you'll find yourself doing quite frequently in Luminotes is making links between notes within your wiki. You can write a separate note for each topic, such as characters in your novel or concepts from the course you're taking. And then you can easily link from one note to another. Is one character related to another? Highlight the character's name, click a button (or press a key), and instantly make a link to their note.

In Google Notebook, you can make links from your notes to external web pages. But there's simply no way to make internal links among your notes. So Google Notebook is great when you're writing about other pages on the web. But what if you're creating a web of notes, sort of like your own personal Wikipedia? Well, then Luminotes might work better for you.

Luminotes only shows you the notes you want to see

This difference is really a design decision that affects every other aspect of using the software. With Google Notebook, all of the notes within your notebook are always displayed. You can't hide a note or close a note, although you can collapse individual notes or even whole sections, which is certainly handy. However, this quickly becomes unwieldy when your notebook starts growing to hundreds of notes. Imagine having to navigate through all of your collapsed notes (or sections) when your notebook gets to include dozens and dozens of entries.

In Luminotes, once you're done editing a note, you can hide the entire note with a single click. This lets you focus on the particular notes you're working on without any distractions. And then if you'd like a particular note to be shown each time you load your notebook, you can easily flag it to be shown on startup. Luminotes also comes built-in with tools for note navigation and searching, so you can easily find notes you've previously written.

Luminotes has fast, friendly support

There are certain advantages to being a huge company. Google can afford a huge fleet of servers to power their products. In many cases, they can even give away their products for free (often with advertisements). But there's one rather marked advantage that small companies can use to differentiate themselves. With Luminotes you get fast, personalized technical support, simply because of economies of scale (or the lack of scale, in this case).

Both products have their advantages

Google Notebook has an optional Firefox add-on, which Luminotes currently lacks. Google Notebook also supports labels (tags), which is still in the works for Luminotes. And Google Notebook of course is well-integrated with some other Google products.

On the other hand, Luminotes allows you to order your notebooks in any way you like, while Google Notebook only supports notebook sorting and not manual ordering. Luminotes allows you to keep your notebook private while subscribing to an RSS feed of your notes, thereby notifying you whenever friends and colleagues make an update. And Luminotes currently has more collaboration options than Google Notebook, allowing you to invite people as viewers, collaborators, or notebook owners.

So which product is for you?

Bottom Line: If you want to make web clippings and have tight integration with your browser via a Firefox add-on, give Google Notebook a shot. But if you want to make your own wiki, creating links between your notes and ideas, then check out Luminotes.

Still here? Great! Then try the Luminotes demo or sign up for an account. And get started creating that personal wiki.

Dan

UPDATE: Since this was originally written, Google has announced that they are discontinuing development of Google Notebook. So that's another point in favor of Luminotes!

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