Google Keep: A possible rival to Evernote and OneNote

Credit: pittaya via Flickr

Google Keep will need some work if it’s going to be a legitimate competitor to Evernote and OneNote -- at least based on its very brief appearance online.

Over the weekend, Android Police reported that Google had launched Google Keep, which it called a note-taking app. But not long after the blog noticed the service, it was gone.

The service looks very basic compared to Evernote and OneNote. Android Police was able to play with it a bit, saving some screen shots, before it was removed. The service lets users create checklists, save photos, and color-code notes.

Box Spread Like Wildfire To 25,000 Employees At This Company
Stay on top of CITE: Subscribe to the InCITE newsletter.

Evernote and OneNote seem to have a much richer organizational capability, letting users organize screen shots, documents, photos, audio snippets, and other content into easy-to-navigate files.

We don’t know if Google Keep is a finished product, if Android Police only saw a small part of the service, or if Google even has any intention of offering a service like it. But Google has hinted that it might. Android Police and others noticed that last year Google accidentally showed a Google Keep link in a screen shot it used to promote another of its service. It quickly removed that link.

Also, Google once offered a somewhat similar service called Google Notebook. It shut down Notebook last summer, but may be transitioning some features from that service to Keep.

A notebook-like service makes sense for Google. Since some people use Evernote and OneNote as file-sharing services to make collaboration easier, Google could be losing customers to those services. People can use Google Docs to share files but it’s not as elegant or easy to use for collaboration as the other services.

Nancy Gohring is a freelance journalist who has been writing about mobile networks, cloud computing and consumer electronics for more than a decade. Read Nancy's bio