Review: Evernote

I was talking with my I.T. guy (aka, my husband) about Furl as an option for clipping websites, articles, etc for future reference. He asked me if I had checked out Evernote.

So, I went. On the surface, it seemed to be a bit like Furl, offering website clipping and tagging, easy search features, etc. And it doesn't have Furl's community features "most tagged," "share with others," and so on.

But here's what it does have: integration. Multiple forms of media. Smart searches. You can take a picture with your phone, email it to yourself, it will read any text in the image and in future searches through your Evernote "notebook" those images will also appear. Imagine - take a picture of a complicated image drawn on a whiteboard, save it, tag it, and search for it later (either by tag or by searching for text in the image itself). SWEET!

With Furl, you clip the whole webpage. You can highlight a quote from it and include it in your information when you save the page. Evernote takes it a step farther - highlight the text in the page, use your "Clip to Evernote" tool, and it saves just that quote for you, saving the URL in the "Note Attributes" (highlighted below).


This is a great feature if you're doing a lot of research for a paper and you just need to save some references or quotes. I definitely appreciate it because I have a hard time absorbing large amounts of information from a screen. I still want to print out a hard copy and use a highlighter. But I can't search that. Here, I'm essentially doing the same thing and now my 'highlighted' notes can be tagged, saved and searched.

I'm going to keep both Furl and Evernote around to see how they work in the longterm. But for now, I have to say that Evernote is more impressive to me. The user interface is more attractive and easier to use. The media integrations and ability to use it from cell phone or email, not just browser, are exciting and useful features. Try it out!